Reading in the Margins

Finding and making a space, and revising a name.

Last month I dreamt I went to Idaho again.

It was a reasonable sort of dream. Once upon a time, my best friend lived there, and once a year or so we would save up all our money and visit each other, from one landlocked side of the US to the other. I’d fly in from Pennsylvania when it was my turn and we’d stay up until an unholy hour, giggling and whispering and writing Northanger-Abbey inspired fanfiction, of sorts.

Last month, I dreamt one of those visits was happening again. The dream was snarled and patchy—one of those where everything is sort of going wrong, but not in a way that awakens you, heart pounding a cold sweat. I won’t bore you with all the details, but in the dream I was nineteen again, just learning to drive, and my best friend was writing in her journal in the back seat of the car. We were arguing over something stupid. It makes sense that I would dream this, not because we argue over stupid things very often these days, but because in real life I was actually visiting her. Except now she lives in New England, and we are older and better at driving, and we are both mothers now, or about to be.

I had flown north to Boston on a Friday, and my best friend picked me up at the airport there, and we went to the Houghton Library and saw and handled (!) four letters of Jane Austen’s (!!!!) and visited Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House. We went to her baby shower (my friend’s, not Alcott’s) and to church together, and I was supposed to fly home the coming Monday, but a nor’easter moved in and I was stranded at my friend’s apartment for two more days.

There are worse things I could do.

I had my books, my notebooks, tea to drink and internet to access. It was a marvelous little respite from everyday life, not unlike the break I took in 2024 when we went to the beach. I had plenty of time to read and research for a big end-of-term project, and one of the books on which I took notes was Austen Years by Rachel Cohen.

One of my sisters gave me this book for Christmas a few years back, and I am now on my second slow luxurious re-read. The notes I wrote after that beach trip (about the same book!) are now forming themselves into the thesis of a paper¹, and the concept of Jane-Austen-At-Rest is constantly on my mind. Circling back to the last time I wrote about Austen Years, in the summer of 2024, I am reminded of the constant pull on my time and the distractions that keep me from reading. Here is what I wrote then:

“In order to get anything done, it seems, I must schedule every day, track my time wisely, multitask and moisturize and cherish the moment and carpe the diem. I am twenty-nine-and-a-half, watching the clock tick toward thirty and more acutely aware every day that I am a writer who still has no degree and nothing traditionally published. I have two small children who pull on my legs and my heartstrings whenever they are with me (which is most of the time). I have an ever-growing stack of books on my bedside table and shelf, a Libby holds list a mile long for combining audiobooks and chores, a drafts folder bursting with part-formed ideas and unrealized wisps of plot.”

Rachel Cohen, who wrote her memoir while in the midst of parenting two small children (and grieving the loss of her father!), seems to understand this very well. “We are subject to constant interruption,” she writes of parents and other careworn adults, “and we must nevertheless exert ourselves to make sense and to become coherent. One lives with one eye on the laundry and one eye on the reckoning.”

I love this way of describing the tugging, shifting balance between the mundane and the intellectual, the determined reading of books in the tired few moments before sleep and the way we are all minutely and constantly building our lives and our sense of self out of days made up of little pockets of thought. A liturgy of the ordinary, if you will.

In my uninterrupted time to read and to sip tea and to pet an astonishingly fluffy cat, I had a lot of time to think. One eye on the book and one on the calendar, I suppose. Luxurious leisure time for reading isn’t typical for me. In normal life, I am slipping it in where I can, choosing to put down a device and pick up a novel, listening to a book instead of music while I drive, tapping my e-reader as I lie beside my two-year-old who can only fall asleep when I am there. I am reading in the margins of my life, making notes and circling and underlining passages to return to, building my reality out of the words I make time to absorb. Reading is more than just a part of me—it is shaping who I want to become.

All that to say I’m re-naming my Substack, lol.

It’s been Something Funny, Something True for four years now. (I wrote about the choosing of the original title here.²) This this title, though quippy, is a little too vague for my current purposes. I was hesitant to make my name too book-centric, for fear people would expect to read only book reviews (a genre in which I’m not too skilled). But that snow day of uninterrupted reading (and thinking!) time gave me a fresh perspective: everything I write comes back to books in the end anyway. Whether that’s Austen, or the Bible, or a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle audiobook as we drive down South, books are in and around and of the margins of my life and work.

Also, I like to write notes for myself about what the book I’m reading is making me think and feel. Here on Substack and in the book itself. In the margins, get it?

So Something Funny, Something True is going to become Reading in the Margins, and by next week my links and headers and such should all be updated to reflect this fact. I hope you like the new name. Whether you do or not is actually of very little consequence, of course, since I maintain absolute tyranny over the publication dashboard, but I do want the title to reflect what you’re getting, and I hope you like that too (for real).

Actually, I could have called it Parenthetical Statements, because I cannot, for the life of me, stop inserting those. It’s a malady at this point.

Happy reading, whether as your full-time job (lucky duck!) or in the parenthetical margins you make for it,

Amy

1. for school! It’s that big project mentioned previously. Maybe I will share some of it here once it’s complete.

2. I need another footnote here with the caveat that, though my 2022 post praises David Sedaris, I’ve become less and less enamored of him in more recent reading. More on that another day, perhaps.