In Praise of the Public Library

My favorite noncommercial haven

Last spring, I stood at the self-checkout stand at my local library and noticed a sign: Mental Health Services at Blackstone Library. The sign explained that every Friday from 9am to 5pm a licensed therapist was available at the public library to give patrons information about the mental health programs and services the library offers. I already loved the library—a place free of commerce, open to the public, warm, and full of books. But the free mental health services pushed me into total reverence for the rest of my days.

I don’t want to brag, but my library game is on point. I put highly anticipated books on hold months before they’re published so I can be one of the first to read them (for free). That’s how I read Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy. My strategy is to request books by already established authors so I can spend my money on books by debut, indie, and BIPOC authors who are building up their readership. Last year, of the 89 books I read, 58 of them hailed from the Chicago Public Library; in 2022, 70 of the 104 books were borrowed. Even with the library’s assist, I still buy enough books to support a teetering TBR pile, which I’ll never get through before I leave this planet.

My system isn’t perfect; sometimes, I learn about a popular book after it hits Obama’s list or earns a National Book Award nomination. I waited months for Hernan Diaz’s Trust, and I’ll be waiting until early May to read a library copy of The Bee Sting. There’s no word in the English language for the sinking feeling of requesting a library book and learning you are number 620 in line. Maybe we can steal a word from German, something that rhymes with glockenspiel.

Beyond the money it saves me, I love the library because it’s one of the rare non-commercial spaces I visit every week. Elisa Gabbert’s 2018 NYT essay, “Recently Returned Books,” articulates the joy of the random, uncurated finds on the library shelf that holds recently-returned books.

You know this shelf. It’s a glorious hodgepodge of reading material, none of which is there because it was recommended by an influencer, or satisfied the algorithm, or because a celebrity christened it “a favorite.” Gabbert describes this shelf as a “random cross section of all the circulating parts of the library: art books and manga and knitting manuals next to self-help and philosophy and thrillers, the very popular mixed up with the very obscure.” My local library doesn’t have a formal section of recently returned books, but next to the circulation desk, there are moveable carts holding books waiting to be reshelved. With a quick swipe of my thin plastic library card, I could help myself to books by Ken Follett, Tommy Orange, or Alice McDermott.

What a goddamned relief to be outside an algorithm and inside the haphazard heart of my community’s reading interest.

Some of my best writing days have taken place at pockmarked tables in the reading sections of Chicago public libraries. In March 2019, I finalized an essay about my beloved Texas grandma, Virginia Peavler Tate, at the Blackstone library. The security guard had announced, Library’s closing in ten minutes, and suddenly I could see the final scene—me driving away from her assisted living facility humming Amazing Grace and sobbing my face off. In June 2022, I sat on the fourth floor of the Harold Washington Library and began drafting the letters that became the final section of my second memoir, B.F.F. Above my head, a florescent light above buzzed steadily, and the outlet in the floor was located so far from my carrel that my laptop cord formed a trip wire. Two tables away, a man watched porn on a free computer. I didn’t care because I’d found the tender-hearted ending that had eluded me for months.

A few weeks ago, I settled myself near that exact spot, hoping to tap into some of that public library writing mojo. During a bathroom break, I opened the ladies’ room door to a distressed woman screaming, “Someone sh*t in the sink!” She pointed to the twin sinks mounted on the wall, and God help me, I looked. (Her report was accurate.) I backed myself right out of the bathroom as the woman ran by me, on her way to the librarian’s desk. Back at my table, still needing to pee, I surveyed my library comrades. Men reading the paper. A woman who’d made her hands into a makeshift pillow on which she could rest her head. A security guard scanning the room. The staff member who’d been summoned to the restrooms with a bleach solution for the sinks.

There’s so much life in a public library, and while not all of it smells pleasant or looks beautiful, I love it for its lack of polish. I love it the way I love the water stains or the slightly torn cover of a library book I’ve waited months to borrow.

Sometimes being in a space that welcomes all people—the broken, the cold, the bored, the tired, the uninspired—feels like the exact right place to write something real.

Here’s to the public library where nannies and caregivers bring tots for story time. Where people seeking jobs can use the internet for free. Where angsty writers can step away from the whir and bustle of coffee shops to write their scenes next to a window that overlooks the federal prison. And yes, where someone in physical crisis can use the sink in a novel way.

The library holds all of us and asks only that we keep our voices respectfully low and return the books after we’ve borrowed them. I will truly love it until the day I die.

Above: The Motown display at the Blackstone Library on Chicago’s southside.

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