Don't Go There

The Little House cover I remember

Great books create worlds that seem so real you could step right into them.  But you can’t really, they are made of words and imagination not bricks and mortar.  Even if they are real locations, zip codes you can punch into the GPS, they are not the same place as the book world.  While I would love to rock on the front porch with Atticus in Maycomb, Alabama, sit by the roaring fire with Hermione in the Gryffindor common room or drink coffee with Blomkvist on Hedeby Island,  I know I can only go there by passing through the pages of a book.

While some settings are actual locations, they don’t have book magic, the secret ingredient that the author adds to create the book world.  Wendy McClure discovered this bittersweet reality in her book The Wilder Life.  For a woman of ‘a certain age’, the Little House books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, bring back vivid memories of visiting a secret book world, discovering a beloved series and escaping into the idealized universe of a story.  

Wendy McClure becomes obsessed with trying to find “Laura World”, and her book retells her quest to discover Laura’s life by experimenting with pioneer living and visiting the settings of the Little House books.  
In an interview with Gretchen Rubin (author of the Happiness Project) Wendy says that her fixation on the books came in part because Laura’s “point of view is at once so subtle and vivid that it feels like I’m in Laura Ingalls’s head, looking with her eyes. I learned so much about how to see from these books, which in turn helped me learn to observe and think like a writer.”

As a book, The Wilder Life is great fun to read - a lot like Julie and Julia by Julie Powell, an obsession based memoir that lets you ride along on someone else’s wacky pilgrimage as they try to make meaning in their otherwise ordinary life.  But learning the differences between the real Laura Ingalls and the fictionalized stories is a little depressing.  And visiting Little House tourist attractions and gift shops chips away at the book magic, like a bad movie adaptation.

A beloved book world is a place that must be protected, at all costs, in your imagination.  The only way to go there is to open the book and read your way there.  Trying to physically go there risks destroying the magic - and besides, opening the book is a lot easier on the wallet than driving across the country, or flying to Hogwarts in a convertible.