Today's post is inspired by NPR's PG-13 series, in which writers talk about the books that influenced them as preteens.
Don't
get up. I know what the intelligent world thinks of The Da Vinci Code.
And let me be the first to say I agree with them. But that's not what this is
about. This is about the day at summer camp when a counselor gave it to
me with the best of intentions, and left me alone with it. It fascinated me. It was like nothing my
twelve-year-old self had ever read. And it taught me three lessons that
have made me who I am.
The first thing I got from The Da Vinci
Code was a rough understanding of how sex worked and how people thought
about it. At twelve, I was embarrassed to even think about What's
Happening To My Body, let alone to read those cute pink books my mother
bought for me. Dan Brown nudged me toward accepting what I was becoming,
and may even have been a root cause of my starting to write myself, and about that in particular. My
free-range detective Mia Lazarus, whose response to her occasional
mental blocks is to get laid, would not have been possible otherwise.
The
second lesson I learned was that orthodoxy is not always right, and
that challenging it could be worthwhile. I read that the Mona Lisa could
have been named for Egyptian fertility gods, that there could be some
truth to conspiracy theories, that Jesus could have been married--in
fact, the closest I've ever come to believing in Jesus was while I was
reading that book. My mother would finish the job in a couple years'
time as my high school civics teacher, giving me not only orthodoxies
that needed to be challenged but also the tools and arguments to
challenge them with. But the world Dan Brown created made me a little
more ready to learn her lessons.
I say "created," and that's an
important part of the third lesson, which I didn't learn until years
later: that books could lie. There's an important distinction in my head
between fiction and lies: fiction can be true if it's well-researched
or -crafted; if its insights into human nature trump the fact that its
events never actually took place. The Da Vinci Code packaged its lies
and poor construction in just enough truth that I learned from it--and
in addition, I learned how to spot bad writing. The book was both the snake
and the fruit in my childhood Garden of Reading.
