Bookaholic

 

Hello. My name is Layce Gardner and I’m a bookaholic.

 

My journey into the abyss began at the tender age of four when I developed a taste for words on the printed page. I came by this disease naturally. I remember waking up to find my mother passed out on the living room sofa, drunk on fiction, a half-read book by her fingertips. I would take the book and sip from its pages without her knowing. As I grew older, I was fed a constant stream of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Ramona the Pest, but my appetites were not satiated and only grew stronger. By the time I was nine, I was stealing books out of my mother’s top drawer and binging, not going to school, staying up days and nights reading torrid pulp like Valley of the Dolls and Peyton Place and The Thornbirds. As a teenager, I was already an experienced book whore. I read in secret, in public, in the tub, in bed, by flashlight, on the toilet, in the car, in school classes. As an adult my tastes grew more eclectic and in order to satisfy my driving need I read obscure self-published authors, Japanese Haiku, French novelists, German philosophers and poets, Italian playwrights of the absurd and, yes, many’s the time I would wake up after days on end not knowing where I was or who’s bed I was in or what happened in the past few days. In my late 20′s I took particular delight in slumming with Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Playboy’s letters to the editor and Penthouse articles.

 

I’ve tried to quit cold turkey. But this only sends me into tailspins of rummaging through trash bins at odd hours looking for a quick fix. I even loiter in all-night laundromats, pretending to wait on a dryer full of clothes that aren’t mine just so I can peruse the bulletin boards. I’ve been known to read cereal boxes and religious tracts and political flyers left tucked under my windshield wiper, so desperate am I for that next high.

 

I’ve tried to quit by gradually stepping down, weaning myself by only reading non-fiction or the works of the great masters of literature – Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Sartre. However, this only whetted my appetite for allegory, metaphor and iambic pentameter.

 

More recently, I have spent my entire paychecks on boxes of lesbian fiction from Bella Books and when I’m jonesing between paychecks I re-read the works of the greatest lesbian wordsmiths: Katherine V. Forrest, Karin Kallmaker and K.G. MacGregor.

 

My name is Layce Gardner and I am a bookaholic.

I don’t want your pity. I only ask for your understanding.

…Oh yeah, I’ve recently reached new depths by writing books myself.