Back To Books: What Running A Bookstore In A Pandemic Teaches You

“We reflected on our lives as women. We realized that we’d missed our share of freedom—sexual, creative or any other kind enjoyed by men. …. Awakened from conjugal torpor we sat on the ground beneath a poster that read A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle and went back over our lives. We felt capable of cutting ourselves loose from husbands and kids and writing crudely. Once we were home again, our determination faded.”

—The Years, Annie Ernaux (tr. Alison L. Strayer), 2017

At the start of the pandemic, lists began to float around everywhere about ‘the books’ to read during the biggest calamity to befall humanity in our times. These lists featured mostly dystopian literature, eerily on the mark about a single virus sweeping entire countries off the map, and about how people could always be counted on to do the stupidest thing to hasten the annihilation of life as we know it.

For us, though, at our bookshop and library, we got a steady call for the lighter reads, McCall Smiths, Christies, Sujata Massey, Vaseem Khan, Rachel Joyce, Gabrielle Zevin and Amor Towles. It seemed like if there ever was a time for a willing suspension of disbelief, it was then. And literature went back to the basics: love, friendship, home, kindness, slow lives. Even the murders managed to be decent somewhat.

In a few months, though, there was a subtle but deep shift in the books we found being taken home: new and old books classified as memoirs, essays and a strange mix of fiction and biography called autofiction (an autobiographical novel or a memoir with fictional narrative techniques). We sold or issued out more books now about loneliness, exile, motherhood, childhood trauma, gender identity and caregiving.

In the span of one afternoon, I saw grief and loneliness exchange hands so many times that I felt this had marked a turning point.

Readers who had hitherto not ventured anywhere close to non-fiction for years, were drawn in by Helen MacDonald’s H Is For Hawk, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Kate Mosse’s An Extra Pair of Hands, extraordinary for their brilliant evocation of love, aging, family, wildness and grief.

After witnessing the love readers have had for Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Rebecca Solnit’s The Field Guide to Getting Lost, Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Annie Ernaux’s The Years, among others, I have come to believe that genre labels can sometimes get in the way of reading.

I carried an armful of these books to the library and shelved them together. Somehow, they weren’t just novels anymore, or weren’t just memoirs or a collection of essays, they were about living or, to be precise, they were about sorting through our feelings and fears about living.

This was undeniably the pandemic’s doing. While the virus turned lives upside down, readers and reading were affected in different ways. Some readers, like me, found they simply could not read, some finally found the free time they had craved to read books they had never dared to begin. While lighter fiction seemed to be the need of the hour, that wave (a word now irrevocably part of pandemic lingo) subsided for many readers after publishers disgorged tons of light reads, most of them depressingly formulaic and very few with characters you would remember after a week.

In the meanwhile, the unthinkable had happened. The world had literally stopped. You worked from home or invented new ways to make money. You had tough conversations with your family, your boss, your landlord, your parents. Everyone you knew was going through this, and you weren’t being particularly singled out. This was the life-changing experience of our time. What you did next depended on your ability to see yourself clearly. Most of us had never gotten around to sorting our heads.

I read somewhere that nearly everyone lives with some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, 2020 and 2021 definitely qualified as traumatic years for most of us. But, we suddenly had weeks, months, a whole year handed to us to seemingly figure ourselves out. And the other thing the virus did is that it put the spotlight on mental health. You’re encouraged to talk about your feelings, to take time. Where to begin? “In times of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature,” says Joan Didion in her classic The Year of Magical Thinking, published in 2005.

Books like the ones I mentioned earlier, appeal to a contemplative reader. Using thinly veiled references to their own lives, several authors have engaged with the very roots of self doubt and discomfort with societal norms, to arrive at unflinchingly honest accounts of their own struggle with grief, exile, despair or a deep rage against inhuman racial and gender injustice. No thought or fear has been too intimate or disturbing to not be parsed and analysed. This isn’t about self-help, it’s like a shared guide. A guide the writer created through contemplation to respond to the subtle nuances of their changing world. By using this trust in the author’s lived experience, and the range and generosity of the writer’s intelligence, many readers immerse themselves in words only to find their own lives reflected and explained.

Mavis Gallant, born in 1922, who wrote about “the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own”, seemed instantly relevant to a bunch of young and middle-aged readers who were stranded in the city, far away from home. It wasn’t just about paying rent that worried some of them, but the inevitability of having to go back home. Gallant’s stories often reflect on how the desire for personal freedom results in hurting those who love you. Olivia Laing’s 2016 book The Lonely City was suddenly sought after and continues to be.

A reader sent me a picture of the opening quote from Nobel Prize-winning author Ernaux’s The Years. He said, “I’ve been living with this sense of faded determination for too long. This jolted me back to life.”

(This appeared in the print edition as "Back to Books")

(Views expressed are personal)

Ahalya Naidu is the co-founder of Trilogy, a curated bookshop and library in Mumbai