Steve Braunias on his daughter's bedtime reading
She is reading her mother's copy of Love Signs by Linda Goodman. It's nice to see it back in the house. It was an almost permanent fixture on one side of the bed for the entire time we were together; one of the things I always loved about her was watching her delicate hands reaching in to browse titles in a bookstore, seeing her curled up with a book, filling her lovely head with the fabulous and compelling insights of Linda Goodman.
She is reading Love Signs in her bed at night time. You can chart your child's life by the books they read. It goes from the picture books of Baby Happy, Baby Sad and Fox's Socks ("Poor old Fox/ Has lost his socks") to the chapter books of Jacqueline Wilson and Roald Dahl to YA novels by John Green and Fleur Beale to adult literature by Jane Austen and Vladimir Nabokov – she read Lolita last year and marvelled at its language and wit. And now, at 13, the bedtime stories of Linda Goodman.
She is reading it from the beginning. Not many people do this, she says. They go straight to the chapters about their own star signs. But the beginning of the book tells you what the book is really about. I asked, "What's it really about?" She said, "Well – everything!" And then she went into the specifics, about its ideas of the holy trilogy, which is not the traditional masculine-only concept of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; but man, woman, and the love between man and woman.
"Very heteronormative," she said, "but still." The love between man and woman is God. "Gee," I said. I liked walking along the street with her while she explained the theology of Linda Goodman.