I understand why people ban books
Speech for the 2024 Iowa Author Awards
On October 11, Caleb Rainey, Carol Roh Spaulding and I were honored with Iowa Author Awards by the Des Moines Public Library Foundation. The award was presented at a time when the Iowa legislature is banning books and refusing to fund programs that will feed children, all the while underfunding the public schools, and restricting the rights of those children.
In my speech, which was adapted from a newsletter I wrote in 2022, I talk about growing up homeschooled in a religious environment, my search for books, and the real impact of bans.
Thank you so much for honoring me with this award tonight. It’s the first writing award I’ve ever received in my life.
And I brought my kids here tonight so they can witness this. Because for too long my daughter, who has won not one but two writing awards, has held it over my head. She reminds me constantly that she is the most award-winning author in our house. And she still is, but I am catching up.
It means a lot to me to be called an Iowa author. I grew up mostly in Texas, but moved around, usually straight up the colon of this country — South Dakota, and Minnesota. I came here in 2005, and — like so many people — I immediately wanted to leave.
But after nearly 20 years of floods, pandemic, inland hurricanes, disaster, being yelled at by all the politicians and probably cussed out by a few of you in this room under your breath, this place is my home. And it means a lot that you all would begrudgingly adopt me.
This is a good place. A beautiful place. And it’s filled with people like you, who want better and are working for better. And I’m proud to be part of that. Although I’ll never learn how to be passive aggressive or call soda “pop.” So deal with it.
I want to tell you a story.
Growing up as a homeschooled kid in Texas, I learned that the best way to sneak books out of the library was by hiding them in the potted plants blocking the space between the security gates and the wall. I slid books in between the pot and the wall and, while my mom was checking the books out and talking to the librarian, I walked through the gates and picked up the books.
I am one of eight kids. There is a lot of chaos all the time growing up in a big family. And I figured out that if I was quiet enough, I could get away with it.
My parents didn’t allow me to read about witches and ghosts and murder. Those were the occult and would somehow connect me to Satanism, the logic went. So, of course, that’s exactly what I wanted to read. I snuck Goosebumps books out of the library and then moved onto Agatha Christie, and then I read biographies of movie stars. I don’t recommend reading Judy Garland’s biography when you are 10.
I’m always trying to access forbidden knowledge.
The summer before I went to college, I got into trouble for sneaking out of my job selling shoes at Sears to go play tennis with friends. And because I was not sorry (and am still not sorry), my parents worried that I was becoming stubborn and ungodly. So they sent me to a camp designed to help protect my mind from the liberal indoctrination that would come from my professors. It is called Worldview Academy, and the camp still exists. The instructors are pastors and erstwhile professors at Christian colleges. We had an entire class about how the humanist view of the world in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein went against God’s design for humanity. We had to be careful, the instructor warned us. Some books were fun to read, but they’d ruin our minds. He calls out Emily Brontë specifically. And when I raised my hand and tried to tell him that the Brontës were actually raised Christian, he told me that I needed to tame my mind into submission, like a wild horse needs to be tamed.
I was being trained not to learn. Trained to close my mind and fight any idea that would threaten the world I’d been raised in. For the rest of the week, I just sat in the un-air-conditioned college classrooms smelling my own body odor and pretending to take notes.
By the time I got to college, I wanted my mind to be ruined.
In college, I read everything in the library. I read Bitch in the House and Me Talk Pretty One Day. I read Hemingway and Baldwin and Voltaire. And I got so angry.
All those years sneaking books out of the library. All those years trying to learn the unknowable, and the answers were right there. They had always been right there. I just hadn’t been able to access them. I hadn’t known where to look. And this was the beginning of my undoing. I’d read books about women who were saints in the Church who had the same questions I had about my faith and my femininity. Women who wrote centuries before I had been alive. Women who were revered and studied. But women whose works and lives had been kept from me.
In the story Teresa of Ávila, I realized I hadn’t been an aberration, or a sinner, or had an ungodly, unruly mind. I’d simply been a person born with questions and curiosity.
This moment of revelation would happen over and over again. And continues to happen. When I read Simone de Beauvoir. When I read bell hooks. When I read Rachel Held Evans, and then again at the age of 35, when I read about Dorothy Day and found myself sobbing in a Catholic monastery realizing that who I am is not a problem in need of a solution.
I hear this story over and over. Friends who were told their identities and their sexualities were the problem. Then one day they read a book and realized that they were not alone, and the world opened up. It’s devastating to learn you felt alone and broken for so long, when you didn’t have to feel that way.
In a manifesto that was handed out by the activist group ACT UP at the 1990 New York City Pride parade, the author (which could be more than just one voice), laments, “I hate that in twelve years of public education I was never taught about queer people. I hate that I grew up thinking I was the only queer in the world, and I hate even more that most queer kids still grow up the same way.”
It’s no accident that the move to ban and remove books from school libraries and to restrict the teaching of critical race theory is happening after a summer of historic racial reckoning. It’s no accident that it’s happening after the murder of George Floyd ignited the country in a debate that forced people to at least pay lip service to the idea of equality and to reconsider, for a moment, our history and the way we tell the stories of our country and our culture. It’s no accident that the book bans are also happening as younger generations talk about sexuality and gender in a way that was taboo even just 20 years ago. The book bans are a reaction to the floodgates of knowledge.
Controlling access to information is about preserving power. Who gets to know that queer identities have been around as long as the history of humanity? Who gets to know about the women who preached and about the queens who put on pants and loved other women? Who gets to know about how to find birth control? Who gets to know about condoms? Who gets to know which boys to avoid dating? Who gets to know which bosses not to be alone with in the office after hours? And who is left out from this knowledge? And who then finds themselves at 35 finally learning that what happened to them at 20 was assault? Who gets to know? And who gets to put a name on their pain? And who doesn’t? Who finds themselves at almost 40 years old reading books written over a hundred years ago and saying, “Why didn’t I know this sooner?”
When you think about the destabilizing power of the true answers to those questions, it’s not so hard to understand why you would ban something. The wonder is when people actually tell the truth.
People say they ban books to protect children. But every day we send bombs to other countries to annihilate children in genocidal wars. We pass laws that aim to protect the lives of children but kill their mothers and then we refuse to feed those children school lunch once they exist. No, it’s not love or protection. These bans are rope tied around children, designed to hold them in place, and keep them tied up and tamed, like that horse the man compared me to all those years ago.
Author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown writes that the limits of our imaginations are the limits of our world. And a world with books offers unlimited imagination, and no boundaries. And to the small mind that limitlessness is terrifying. But we are here tonight because we know better.
The world changes when you know things.
In 2014, my friend’s son died. One day he didn’t wake up from a nap. He was only 11 months old. I immediately packed up the car and took my children (then 9 months old and almost 2) to her home. My friend had two other children, and I watched our kids play as I scrubbed out her fridge and made her casseroles, because I didn’t know what else to do. “How could you take your children to that funeral?” someone asked after we came back.
And I try to explain that why should my kids be protected from a brutal truth while other children have to experience it. Isn’t it better to tell children hard truths so other children don’t have to be alone?
And three years later, when I ended my 12-year marriage, that same friend who lost her son came to help me move and clean my new fridge, and I would think what a relief it is to have someone with me who knows that life can just fall apart.
But that “How could you expose your kids to that?” is a logic that traps some children in the loneliness of knowledge and others in the loneliness of ignorance. It’s the same logic that bombs children in other countries but refuses to teach children in this country about it.
We believe we must parcel out the world in small doses to them. But really, it’s just creating a cycle of ignorance that just establishes control. After all, if you can control what is good and bad in a child’s life, you can control them. Once you open the world up, once you show that things are more complicated, control becomes a lot harder. The line of authority is breached.
They are no longer tethered.
But I remember childhood. I remember being protected from the world out there. I remember being monitored for dangerous ideas. And so I know that children know the world is deep and dark and bright and beautiful. We don’t have to teach them that. We don’t have to hide the monsters from them. Instead, we have to equip them to slay the monsters and hold fast to what is true and good.
That sentiment above comes from G.K. Chesterton in his book Tremendous Trifles. In 1909, Chesterton wrote in response to a letter writer, who was upset about fairy tales exposing children to witchcraft and other evils:
“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
This is what I believe about knowledge. This is what I believe about books.
In 2022, while writing my book This American Ex-Wife, I took night classes on feminist texts about love. During a conversation about bell hooks a young person, exasperated, sighed and said, “I wish feminists had been having conversations like this about love before.”
And was irritated. I want to hand her the stack of books that is by my desk, leaned against the wall. I want to tell her the conversation has been happening for centuries. But I understand; people don’t usually hand young girls copies of The Dialectic of Sex and say, “Marriage is a form of control, but love can be liberation.”
And I know why we don’t do that. Because knowledge rips open the world. Knowledge comes with risk. When they say the truth sets you free, what they don’t tell you is that the freedom comes because the truth lit the match and burned down your home. Not knowing is a little easier.
For years and years, I thought I had successfully snuck those books out of the library. But now, as a parent, when I think back, I know those librarians must have known. But they let me keep thinking I was getting away with something. And I think of all the librarians and teachers in this state, looking the other way when a 10-year-old reads a Judy Garland biography. And I think about what a gift that is, to allow a child to expand their world, even if it means they come back with hard questions.
Right now, it is so easy to feel full of despair. In a state of book bans, abortion bans, bans on LGBTQ healthcare, it’s easy to feel hopeless.
But how can we feel hopeless when every day a child picks up a book and sees the world in a new way through stories? How can we feel hopeless when every day someone puts a book into a child’s hand and says, “Here is the world, I want you to have it”?
I want to thank you all for what you do, as librarians, as lovers and supporters of books and authors for expanding our imaginations and expanding our worlds. For fighting against the power that would make our worlds and our hearts smaller. Thank you.
This is, bar none, the best speech on the power of books and the freedom to read I’ve ever seen. Spare no one who would ban books or the truth from children. Light a fire under them. I grew up thinking I was alone. Being scared by the Bogey at first is so much better than that prison of loneliness, when one book, just one, could open a child’s life to a rich and beautifully diverse world.
"Knowledge comes with risk. When they say the truth sets you free, what they don’t tell you is that the freedom comes because the truth lit the match and burned down your home. Not knowing is a little easier."
That is so tragically beautiful, thank you.