You Can Never Go Back

So many wonderful lines in this amazing essay by Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, I can’t keep myself from quoting:

I’d trade sex and booze and wisdom—all the best parts about being Grown—if I could have back [childhood]. Colors brighter, smells stronger, days bleeding on forever, and oh . . . reading. In childhood, there’s almost nothing to keep you from reading.

Kid’s books are where I personally learned most everything important about the world: About rape and sinister men from Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck; about eroticism from Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen; about feminism from P.L Travers’ maverick goddess Mary Poppins; about loss and the unceasing progress of time from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web.

And lots more. Go read it!

You Can Never Go Back: On Loving Children’s Books as an Adult