This is the first post in the Stories Save My Life series. I’m really excited about the guestposts we’re going to get and the comments they’ll hopefully generate on the impact stories have on our lives. Personally, I will probably write about many stories, from many mediums, while this series is running. I would be remiss, however, if I began it with anything else other than the stories which Anne Shirley inhabits, chief among them: Anne of Green Gables.

Backstory: I was an odd child. From an early age, I had an incredible vocabulary, a vast (and at times, overpowering) imagination and not many people knew how to take me. I was interested in things that other kids found boring. When I tried to talk with adults, they were put off by a child of ten who wanted to discuss philosophy, theology and politics with them. I made up stories and talked incessantly, cracking jokes, composing poems, talking about movies, stories and books. I was constantly getting into trouble, letting my mouth run off. I had such big ideas, and such a fire in my belly, that whenever I felt anything, I said everything.

I believe the word to politely describe me was precocious . I believe the words more commonly used were “weird”, “brat”, “know-it-all”, and “strange”. Everywhere I went I felt like an outcast.

All of this, combined with being a late-bloomer, meant that for me, childhood was painful. Sometimes still, I feel sick thinking back to showdowns on the blacktop, being pushed into walls, down school stairwells, hit with dodgeballs (outside of any game) and laughed at by peers. I remember adults scolding, teasing and laughing derisively. I remember wanting a way out of my life by the age of twelve, tempted by thoughts of suicide. My saving grace was my imagination and the stories I both fed it and created within it. It was necessary to retreat into my imagination to get away from being bullied by my peers and elders.

My dreamworld became a refuge and I built it with good music, good books and good movies. One character in particular, Anne Shirley, the heroine of many books by L.M. Montgomery, showed me how to build that retreat and promised that one day, eventually, I wouldn’t need to hide there.

I first read the Anne books when I was very young. I can’t even remember how early the books came, but I know that quotes from L.M. Montgomery’s works were working themselves into my conversations by 4th grade. I read through the series several times, but especially through the first three books: Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island. I rewatched the PBS mini-series over and over. Anne Shirley was a friend to me. She made me feel valid.

We were both bullied. She was rarely described as “precocious” by anyone except her readers. By the adults in her world, she was described cruelly. She was misunderstood by 98% of her peers. We were both teased for our freckles. Her hair was her most hated feature, as was mine (although her’s was for its color, and mine was for its sheer size- no matter what length I chopped it to, it was big enough to warrant its own zip code). That picture above… is not of Hermione Granger.

Anne relied on stories like she relied on air and used everything in her path to fuel her imagination. After a life that, when the reader meets her, consisted of being an orphan, being beat and used as a servant, she arrives on Prince Edward Island and experiences joy that the average adult can’t fathom. She and her new guardian, Matthew, drive down a blossom-filled avenue she dubs “The White Way of Delight”, past a pond she calls 
“The Lake of Shining Waters” and she feels like she’s arrived in heaven itself. All of a sudden, to me, the brown hills that served as dreary walls for my hometown of Fremont, California, had changed. They were covered in velveteen gold, rolling away towards other valleys and opening up towards the north and south. The smog on the horizon disappeared, eaten up by the blue sky. The cracked sidewalks became canyons in my mind. Little green blades of grass became like cedars of Lebanon to me. I made the best of what I had. I reveled in what little “scope for the imagination”, as Anne called it, that my hometown afforded.

So try to conceive of the bliss that bowled me over when I moved up to the Pacific Northwest. My gigantic hair, vocabulary and imagination made things almost as difficult for me in my new state as it’d been in California. But here in the Northwest, I finally had the beauty that Anne had when she arrived in Prince Edward Island. Behind our house was a forest that descended into a valley, away from the housing developments. The forest there was dark and mossy. There were pines, cedars and maples. Down the winding trail, once you reached the valley floor, the tall trees retreated to a circle around a tiny meadow. It was as if they were guarding this secret place. A spring bubbled up in a cluster of birch trees on the southern end of the valley. Best of all, every August, the meadow filled up with Queen Anne’s lace, a flower I’d only, until that point, read about in the Anne books. It looked like a cloud had settled down on the valley floor for a quick nap before rejoining its brothers in the sky. I named it Anne’s Valley and escaped there whenever I could.

As silly as that may sound, it was the first dream of mine that had ever come true. After years of reading Anne books and wishing that I had more than cracked and dry surroundings, I finally had my version of P. E. Island. It reinforced my desire to hold onto the books as a beacon. Maybe, if both Anne and I had found a wilderness to escape into, and a town set amongst the blossoms and lakes of shining waters, then maybe other things would happen too. Maybe I’d grow into my features. Maybe one day, I’d write a book of my own and my wordiness would make my way in the world, rather than making me an object of ridicule.

And wouldn’t you know… all those things, after many awkward, character-building adventures, did come to pass. My hair became manageable around eighteen, darkening and reddening at the same time so that my hair was auburn, like Anne’s became. Instead of frizzy, it was silky. That may sound vain, to have worried about something like that, but trust me: my wild hair gave me more than one nickname over the course of my childhood and teen years. In 2001, I started writing on a blogging platform called LiveJournal and people started liking me, for the first time in my life, for the way I had with words. I started to seriously work on my fiction and poetry in my early twenties and just finished my first novel in 2010, at the age of 28.

When I was heading into the final chapters of my book, I had a morning when, as I sat down at my desk, I looked out of the window and into the forest. I saw the mist curling in through the woods, cutting amongst the trunks of trees and curtains of moss. I looked down into the flower beds and saw the purple, fuschia and yellows wildflowers rioting up from dark soil. I looked back down at my desk and saw my book, almost finished, open on a Word file. Tears filled my eyes. I had become who I wanted to be when I was little. Whatever else becomes of me, in that moment and since then, I am the adult that my childhood-self desperately wanted to be. I am loved by a man with dark hair and dark eyes. My hair is now one of my favorite features. I’ve learned to control my temper and wicked tongue. Many people actually appreciate the way I have with words and the way that my mind works. I’ve written a book and I have dozens more books, poems and screenplays burning a hole in my heart to get out onto the page. 

I am so lucky that Montgomery’s Anne Shirley was there to promise this all for me. I knew that if someone had written this book, then that person knew what it was like to be me. That meant that I was not alone. As young as I was, I knew that if this book was popular almost a century after publication, that there were many who read it and loved it like I did: not as a distraction, but as a life preserver.

I would return to the series many times, in childhood, my teenage years and in my twenties. I suspect I will always return to it. When my idealism is threatened, when I feel alone, or when I need to be reminded that a few kindred spirits are better than a hundred fake friends, I’ll take up the series again. It may not be the best written series. I understand why some marginalize it. For me, it’s literary defects are outweighed by the world that it creates and the character at its center. Without her, I wouldn’t have had the strength to stick out two awkward decades in hopes that someday, I’d hit my stride. And I have. And that is why the story of Anne Shirley is the first story that saved my life.

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As I said in the introduction to this series, if you have a story (from film, books, comics, short fiction or television) that impacted your life, let me know. Several people have already contacted me about posts and they’ll be posted here over the next couple weeks and months, but I still want more. Maybe you’ve never thought that a story defined you, or maybe you think the story that meant the most to you is too silly to write about. Trust me, there is no snobby cut-off for this series. If it’s a story and it’s influenced you, let’s get into it. This series will only be as good as the interaction we get on it.

On that note, I hope that all of you who are reading this will take the time to comment:

What are some stories that defined your childhood?