I was ten when I read my first novel. A hardcover with its author’s suited figure on the dustjacket, Tim Allen’s autobiography was genres apart from anything I had ever read before. While it wasn’t really the first novel I had read— I had been stealing the good parts of my mom’s Harlequin and Jackie Collins’ novels for months, it was the first one I had ever read cover-to-cover.
I had gotten the book from our church’s benevolence bin. While we were usually given pantry staples— plastic bags of beans and rice, stacks of sardines and the occasional box of half-melted peeps, one weary afternoon after Sunday service a small line of us were offered our pick of books that had come from overseas. By the time my mother and I got to the front of the folding table, all the age-appropriate literature were gone. With the only library more than 10 miles from our village, spectacled grannies and burly mothers had no doubt snatched them all up.
Among the leftover business books and naked hard backs was Tim Allen’s smiling face. Although he looked stern with his arms crossed over his suit, his sly grin made me remember him, as he was in “The Santa Clause,” all plump and grey; so I took his book home hiding it under those my mom had picked out.
It wasn’t very well written now that I try to recall parts of it. It’s certainly not something I’d read now. But in those early days of having to choose between the bedtime fairytales I had outgrown and the literacy textbooks loaned to me by cousins, Tim Allen’s 200 plus paged novel was a reader’s goldmine for me. I read it religiously— peeling off its dark dustjacket to reveal the lemon-colored cover. Out of habit I would flip through the pages to find a sentence I liked or one that made me laugh. I’d read from there until I got bored or heard my mom yelling my name. But soon tired of reading the same sections over-and-over and searching for pages I hadn’t read yet, I started to read the book in chapters— skipping over the ones I thought boring. I eventually worked up enough patience and curiosity to read it in full.
As a child on the brink of adolescence, I liked Tim Allen because he was crude and called things what they were. Without tiptoeing around my assumed innocence, he directed me through the subtleties of the adult world . In his crude portrait of childhood, I saw myself. I was—as he was in his autobiography—trying to make sense of the seemingly arbitrary things in my life.
Now all I remember from that once mesmerizing tale of his are his jokes about penises and bikes. Those parts seemed to be more important to my ten-year-old self than his cocaine habit or prison sentence because— in spite of all my wanting to be adult— I didn’t really understand what that meant. In that treasured hardback of mine, he rambled on and on about his life. Ever so often, he’d get bored—or maybe become aware of his own rambling— and note how much time had gone by. As a kid this used to amuse me—to think of him imagining himself as me. But now, after a decade of reading, I think of his plotless writing as juvenile. Yet his book was still my first real novel—one I didn’t have to steal parts of; one I could wedge under my pillow without worrying about dog ears; one I would eventually let perish in the rain on our front-landing.
