The 50th Anniversary of Giovanni's Room

Deb Woodell of the Philadelphia Daily News asked me and some other authors to comment on the significance of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. The book is half a century old! Read the result in her column Giovanni's Room at 50.

It took me hours to ponder why the book was important to me, but I loved the assignment. Here's what I wrote for her column...(and I enjoyed the irony of referencing Nabokov's Lolita).

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It smells like my mother's faded perfume, my father's exhaled scotch. When I open the book now, I smell a year when I had no shadow. I was a ten-year-old without a place to stand; it's called childhood, but memory brings echoing, smoky voids. Giovanni. Gi-o-va-a-a-ni. Gee. Oh. Vawn. Eee. Fire of my loins. I loved him. A queer criminal love, my first, found right inside Baldwin's pages.

I had grabbed the Apollo paperback edition from my parents' bedroom bookshelf, opened it, and the sentences singed and hurt and felt right. I was a girl full of longing, hungry to have someone near me: a book might fill the void. I didn't understand what I read. But I did. I tore into "Giovanni's Room" several times over the next few years, not knowing what drew me back; it was like one of those dank caves at my favorite beach, challenging me to go further each time.

The joy and the terror! Then a shudder of recognition. One late summer afternoon, I entered Giovanni's dark room and knew why, at last, I belonged.