By Kim McCullough
Big Reader, Susan Olding’s second collection of essays, winds its way through a writer’s lifetime of books and reading. Olding’s essays examine the way books and stories can bring clarity and depth to our lived experiences and how they allow the smallest details of life to resonate.
Although this book threads through Olding’s own life as a reader, she invites and draws us along on her journey with engaging, poetic, and imaginative prose. Each essay comes with its own set of stakes addressing challenges that range from failed relationships to step-parenting to the advancing age of her parents. The topics are varied, but the importance of the written word is foundational to the pieces in the book.
Before each individual essay are memory-rich vignettes that create a compelling sub-narrative. The second-person point of view of these sections echoes with the familiar sense of distance that often envelops remembrances of significant past events.
Olding’s skill as an essayist is not limited to her excellent storytelling. She is a master at creating structure; some essays are braided or presented as a collage, while others are more traditional but no less beautiful. No matter the form, strong imagery, and precise language elevate each piece.
An example of Olding’s ability to match structure with story shines in her braided essay about her father’s death. She entwines various encounters with blood—blood type, the blood she shares with her father, literal blood—in a way that brings the same strength a braid can bring to individual strands of hair. Writing about this fraught relationship with her father is elevated by the relief of a separate thematic thread. It allows the reader space to step back, focus on another element, and let the deeper, more difficult parts of the story sink in.
Throughout the book, Olding guides the reader’s experience of the story—she speeds up or slows down the telling in her collaged essays—long reflections on scenes from Anna Karenina, or descriptive segments on satirist William Hogarth’s images in A Rake’s Progress, are interspersed with punchy, personal sections that keep the reader engaged.
Each piece in this book of essays has its own beauty and melancholy, its own discoveries and epiphanies. What ultimately ties this collection together is not only Olding’s experience as a “Big Reader,” but the way every essay addresses her clear and constant love for her family and the world around her.