Ann Hulbert

I remember a novella by Henry James called The Pupil, which I read in a sort of summer program for bookish high schoolers. It sort of changed the way I read in that I was always sort of looking for the secrets that this omniscient narrator who seemed to be just telling you a story was actually slipping in about something.

a particular character that that character didn't necessarily know himself or herself. And that as a reader, I really had to pay very, very close attention to figure out myself. And it just sort of added a whole new dimension to reading and kind of made it a quest in a way that I think it hadn't so much been before. It's about an anxious young tutor and an ailing, precocious boy.

And they're both trapped in this American family that is debt-ridden, self-deluding, sort of exploitative. And what you read at first as a kind of social satire in a wonderfully Jamesian way actually turns out to be this really heartbreaking story of a relationship between them. at its core, all in, you know, 18,000 words.

It does all sort of point to not just this insight into narrative technique, but kind of into a whole realm of curious dynamics between children and adults, and who really knows more, the children or the adults, that I've been interested in ever since. I just spent a lot of time in worlds that I found in books. And I feel very nostalgic for that even now.

And I'm sure I romanticize the degree to which it was sort of easy to do that. That's my memory is that, you know, I just... You know, had a phase in which I just wanted to read all the fattest books in the library. And so ended up just reading a jumble of things that I was really glad to have encountered. And I can't imagine having lived through adolescence without that as part of my life.

I can't imagine life without. without having had these different worlds in which I could lose myself and feel like I was learning all about how human beings work, how society works, and what's possible to do with words, which in the end proved really important to me. I am Anne Hulbert, and I'm the literary editor at The Atlantic. After the break, more good memories.