As a kid I saved a portion of my meager weekly allowance and spent the rest at the used bookstore. Located in a suburban strip mall alongside a sandwich shop, Payless shoe store, a rotating cast of tax preparation franchises and a Blockbuster Video, it was filled mostly with romance novels and Tom Clancy paperbacks. Since I never saw male patrons there, I assumed those volumes had been purloined by wives who needed more trade-in credits to feed their smut addictions.
I kept up with the popular young adult series of the day — Christopher Pike, Fear Street, Sweet Valley University — but did much of my browsing at a battered bookcase marked Arts & Literature. The pickings were slim but it was fertile ground for a kid whose parents were late to cable TV. Those shelves were where my precocious D.H. Lawrence phase began and where the emotional brutality of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? first galvanized me. It was where I discovered Sartre, Ibsen and Edmond Rostand in fragile paperbacks that still top the unsightly bookcase tower behind my desk.
The store has been closed for longer now than it existed, an early casualty of the Internet, but it is always with me, inextricably tied to ideas, themes and turns of phrase (“What a cluck! What a cluck you are”) that animate my daily existence. “You are — your life, and nothing else,” Inez says in No Exit, and however your thoughts on Sartre might’ve changed in the course of adulthood, and however much it pains me to agree with Inez about anything, that is true enough. I am nothing more than my life, and while I’m unlikely to ever divulge the deepest details of it here, there are bits and pieces I’m willing to share in the coming months as an experiment of sorts. We’ll see how it goes.