Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
Can I tell you a secret? Out of all the books that I have read and loved, one of the dearest to me will always be Little Women.
Because I was ever a Jo and my sister was ever an Amy. This book was the first book to show me that you could actually be different and succeed. You could be a girl/woman and a writer. You could have short hair and madcap adventures and fall in love and still be a writer. Jo was everything to me. She worked and she wrote and failed and triumphed and suffered and won. But she was above everything else, a SHE and SHE WROTE.
Narnia gave me the endless possibilities of different worlds and times and a special kind of magic. Little Women taught me that it was okay to be eccentric and strange in my actual life. That it was appropriate to want to have writing as a passion and a career. That I could want more than being a wife and mother married to an officer and leading that kind of life. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not denigrating those choices and those who make them. The Megs and the Marmees of the world are incredibly important. I know quite a few people who would be utterly lost without them.
I only mean that, for me, who was born a kind of Beth with multiple illnesses and a certain kind of medical fragility, who was raised by a Marmee who was so wonderful and so patient as I grew into Jo. As the eldest in the family, I was trained and expected to handle the duties of a Meg and in our family, the joke was that you either became military or you married it. So I was, in a way, brought up to be Meg. It never really fit correctly, like a dress that doesn’t quite fit. I could perform all the functions of a Meg but it didn’t bring me the inner happiness that I saw in several of my relatives. Jo and her everything showed me that there was another way. That I wasn’t broken because Meg just didn’t fit me.
I could be Jo. Wild and wonderful and creative and passionate and messy. I could have my happily ever after, if I wanted one, without sacrificing the words that bubbled up from within.
Jo was a lifeline when I desperately needed one and for that, Little Women will always be one of the books that made me. The latest adaptation was quite good and it’s definitely worth watching if you haven’t already seen it.