“There is life and there is book club.”
That’s how a friend sums up the connection that exists between woman who meet once a month to share their thoughts on literature and much, much more.
There is daily existence, with its constant press of family, friends, work and responsibilities, and there is that single evening of conviviality shared month after month, year after year by women who may not socialize at all in their day-to-day lives.
If it isn’t exactly a text-book definition of friendship that binds book club members, it’s something equally valuable and just as strong.
Today’s book clubs — and their popularity has soared in the last decade — serve a similar function to the coffee klatches of my mother’s generation or the play groups to which so many of us toted our babies 10 or 20 years ago.
They don’t just get us out of the house; they also bring the solitary pastime of reading into the collective domain, where it can be debated and deliberated.
For more than a decade, I’ve enjoyed the often raucous, sometimes heart-breaking meetings of the Love in Tokyo book club. The name, a puzzlement to almost everyone, was plucked from the pages of Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.”
(Love-in-Tokyos, according to the book, are those coated rubber bands with beads attached that have secured the ponytails of almost every little girl on the planet.)
I’m convinced the success of any book club relies upon members’ willingness to be absolutely uninhibited in their discussion, passionately defending their viewpoints and never shrinking from a debate.
My book club friend attributes the bond to meeting in each other’s homes with nothing but our opinions and a glass of wine to offer. “It encourages a kind of intimacy,” she says.
I’ve come to see my fellow members, all of whom have children older than mine, as wise yentas full of good advice and counsel or as a sisterhood whose shared experiences can be far more dramatic than those found in the pages of the latest best-seller.
We’ve discovered the depth of our bond the hard way. In just 11 years, we have suffered job losses, broken marriages and far more sickness than seems possible among a group of women who are just now reaching 50.
Our first loss was one of our own. Our friend was a voracious reader, an articulate and thoughtful commentator, a woman who knew how to be both clever and kind.
Early in her battle with cancer, our book club offered support with meals and get-well cards and upbeat messages. Later, we watched and prayed from a remove, finally wearing our love-in-Tokyos on our lapels and around our wrists as we celebrated her life and paid tribute to her memory.
Sadly, her’s wasn’t the only loss. In recent years, a husband has fallen to cancer and another has battled it, while a son wages his own fight against drugs.
All this in a pleasant neighborhood of comfortable homes and tree-lined streets, among a circle of friends who also have enjoyed their share of life’s many pleasures and privileges, from vacations and weddings to home remodels and accomplished children.
There is life and there is book club — and sometimes they overlap.
“The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one’s encounter with it in a book, Andre Maurois said.
The same can be said for book club.
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