This is an introductory post, about why I started reviewing books and what led me to start this blog. Please proceed with caution – this post discusses grief and sibling death.
As one of the most famous fictional bloggers of our time said often, “I couldn’t help but wonder…” I too found myself recently thinking about the what-ifs of my own life and choices.
As a person who enjoys thinking about hypotheticals (law school did not break me of this habit, unfortunately for my nearest and dearest, it only cemented this rather unfortunate personality flaw), I often find myself wondering down the garden path of what-ifs – about paths I could’ve chosen differently, the kinds of people I might have met, the ways that life could have gone differently, and also just as often about mundane things as the mysteries of life.
I chose to start this blog for a myriad of reasons, some of which are clear to me, and others I hope to discover along the way.
For the last year, I have enjoyed posting photos and mini reviews of books that I have been reading on my bookstagram. It has given me joy in an otherwise joyless time, a passion project when things have been otherwise stagnant in my professional life, and something to explore other parts and sides of myself that had laid dormant for too long.
I started my bookstagram in June 2020. We were at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and thought we might be out of it by fall or winter at the latest (boy were we wrong – as I write this now, cases have skyrocketed in my home state of Missouri, and my state has still failed to reach 50% vaccination).
2020 was not just a year of great upheaval and universal tragedy – it was also a year of great personal tragedy and loss.
In January 2020, my little brother, Caleb, died in a car accident.
He had just turned 20 years old on the 15th of January. We had not really had a chance to speak since the holidays, but we had made plans to meet up soon when I was in town for a court date. I didn’t even have a chance to talk to him on his birthday, just sent a text, and told myself I needed to call him soon to check in. But work had kept me so busy that I kept putting it off.
And then, suddenly, it was too late.
And just like that…
He was gone.
In the days that followed, I felt numb to the world, numb to the responsibilities that were pressing down on me. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. One of my two little brothers, one of the people I was supposed to protect from everything, one of the people who had looked up to me for guidance and direction, had died.
I was so lost. I believed I had failed him. I hadn’t been there for him, to try to guide him or just being around for him to talk to.
He was underage, but was drinking all the time with people who were not good for him to be around. People who gave him things that he used to numb something in him that I had tried so hard to believe was just a post-break-up reaction. But I think my brother was not in a good place. I believe he was probably depressed and didn’t know what to do with those feelings, as a person who was used to being so happy, so alive, so fearless, that depression wasn’t even in his vocabulary.
But he had made a mistake of driving after having a drink, drove too fast, lost control of his car, and after many agonizing hours of trying to save him, he had died.
The day after we buried him, a Thursday in February, my firm assigned me trial for the next Monday. I was so upset and irate that they would have the audacity to give me this at such a time. That was the catalyst that pushed me to then quit my job. At a firm that was already so toxic to my own mental health, but this was the final straw.
I spent the next weeks and months in a state of suspension. Nothing felt real. Nothing seemed to matter.
My brother, one of the two people in this whole entire world who knew exactly what it was to be a sibling to me, to share the same memories and stories, who was supposed to grow old alongside me, who I was supposed to get to watch graduate from college, get his first job, to find his forever love, to watch him walk down the aisle, and maybe have kids one day who called me aunt, to help care for our parents and our family, to be there beside me as we grieved, was gone.
I was not supposed to be grieving him. I was supposed to get more time. He was supposed to get to grow up. To get to have a family. To grow up and be my lifelong friend.
So, yes, 2020 was a year filled with a lot of regret. A lot of time that I spent wondering about the what-ifs, how I could’ve just changed one thing, or said something, if it would’ve made a difference. Wondering what Caleb would be doing in this pandemic, how it would’ve affected his plans to become a commercial pilot or if he would have joined the air force.
So many what-ifs, so many hours spent wondering.
And at the end of so much of this soul searching, I’d always come back to question of what would Caleb do? If things were reversed? How would this have changed him, or not?
The thing about my brother is that he was the most fearless person I’ve ever known.
He lived every day as if it really was his last.
He did everything he wanted to do, and no one could tell him no. He was charming, funny, charismatic, and never met a stranger. He was rascally and mischievous, and never passed up a chance to mess with you. He loved his family deeply, he loved flying, he loved working on and driving fast cars, and he loved to tell a tall tale. You never knew for sure if his stories were true or a little bit made up, but it didn’t matter because he’d probably have you laughing till you cried. If he found himself in trouble, he always managed to talk himself out of it. Somehow. Because he was Caleb. And you would just shake your head in disbelief, but he’d still make you smile, even if you were so infuriated with him you couldn’t see straight. It didn’t matter, because he’d somehow find a way to show he was sorry if he’d gone too far.
Caleb probably lived more in his 20 years than most people live in 80.
And the more I thought about what he would want me to do, I could hear his voice telling me how stupid I was to spend all this time crying and moping, when I should be living life like him.
So, I took my brother’s advice.
I looked at my life, at everything I hated about it – my job, my schedule, my lack of personal time, the lack of passion – and decided to change it.
I got a new job. I am still doing law, since it was a pandemic and I couldn’t leave the law altogether, as much as I still want, and plan to. But I made sure that I no longer had to travel or do trial work – both of which had contributed to my rapidly deteriorating mental health. I moved to a transactional/in-house position that gives me a real work-life balance.
I started looking at the things that actually brought me joy and making lists of those things, hobbies, and jobs that would allow me to find passion and joy again.
So much of that list revolved around books – my love for reading, writing, editing and reviewing books and papers, things that I was able to do in college and on law review, but that I had sorely lacked since entering practice as an attorney. It took me a long time to admit that I wish I’d gone into a different field, like publishing or library science. I finally realized that I’d been just kind of doing what was expected of me, as the eldest child, the perfectionist, the overachiever, the one who was “supposed” to be doing certain things. And that did not make me happy.
That list also highlighted how much I wished I used my undergraduate education, particularly my History and English degrees, to share my own passion for both books and history. And particularly, my own journey toward unlearning whitewashed history, decolonized history.
From this, Golden Girl Book Club was born.
As an instagram page, I focus my attention both on book reviews and on activism, on shining a light on social injustice and on decolonizing my bookshelf, mind, and history, making sure to shine light on diverse books and authors, and to uplift other bookstagrammers in our community who were experiencing discrimination in real time. It started with book reviews, but it morphed into alot more than that.
And I had found that I love writing about books, about activism, about mental health, about grief, about my own personal struggles and my triumphs, about these things that books gave me and made me reflect on in myself.
I wanted a platform to do just that – to deep dive into the books I read, but to also go further, and explore the themes and the things that these books make me curious about, about the things that I just “couldn’t help but wonder” about. To talk about the hard things, the important things, the silly things, the fun things, and to create a space for other book loving, history loving, change makers to stop by, even if it is maybe sometimes griefy, sad, and a little uncomfortable.
Starting this blog, writing this post – this was one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while. I almost didn’t write this in my introduction because grief isn’t pretty, it’s not inviting. Its messy, its uncomfortable, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written and rewritten this, while sobbing my eyes out.
But I also think that being real and authentic about who I am and what brought me to this place is important context for understanding this blog. For understanding why I am not writing a private journal, and rather sharing the darkest and hardest thing that has ever happened to me in a public context.
Because, when I first joined the grief community, I looked for stories like my own. I looked for others who had suffered as I had suffered. For people to share in this pain, to know that I wasn’t alone.
And while I found so much support in other grievers, it was in books and through bookstagram, that I found something more. I found a community that loved books as much as I did, but I also found others who had lost someone and who understood. And I found solace and comfort in books, in reading, as I had growing up.
It is in books that we go to read new stories and find new adventures. That we learn about others like us and so different from us. That we find comfort in the fact that so much may be different, yet so much might be the same. It is the stories that we seek and that bring us comfort, that meet us where we are, and touch something within us when we need it most.
As many readers know, books can be so many things. They can be educational or escapism, comforting or communal, adventurous or activism. They widen our consciousness, expand our world view, bring us new ideas and ways of looking at the world.
Books saved me.
They saved me when I was a shy, introverted, neurodivergent child who never quite fit in. They saved me when I was in law school and felt out of place, depressed, anxious, and had made a huge mistake. And they saved me when my brother died, and my whole world flipped upside down, and I had no purpose or desire to go on.
I started writing about and reviewing books as a way to build up a place in the book community, but somewhere along the way, I realized how much I had needed that lifeline.
So, I hope that you stay and find out what this blog becomes. I hope you too will rediscover wonder in your life and join me on this journey and not regret leaving words unsaid, thoughts unspoken, paths unexplored.
Welcome to my little corner of world, I hope you snuggle up and stay a while.
Stay Golden,
Cam
“‘Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living.’”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
Golden Girl Book Blog 