Reading as escape and a life lived by proxy

Reading as escape and a life lived by proxy is the role books play in Maren’s life: they let her inhabit other people’s problems for a while when her own future feels difficult to imagine. The refuge is temporary, but not trivial. Books are a source of company, a means of passing through an unfamiliar world, and eventually part of a daily routine that gives her a place to belong.

A life entered through books

Maren explains the difference between her reasons for reading and the promise of self-improvement that Lee associates with books. When he says he has never been much of a reader, she asks whether his mother read him bedtime stories. He answers that she was not that kind of mother. Lee then suggests that he never made friends with novels, but he also dismisses the schoolroom idea that reading more books or learning bigger words makes a person better. His conclusion is stark: he cannot better himself. The exchange defines a contrast between reading as an instrument for improving a person and reading as a way of temporarily becoming someone else.

Maren makes that second purpose explicit. A book allows her to be another person for two or three hundred pages, sharing the problems of an ordinary life even when that life involves time travel or fighting aliens. Her examples move between the recognizably normal and the fantastical, but both offer distance from her immediate circumstances. Reading does not promise to resolve those circumstances or transform her character; it gives her another set of concerns to inhabit for the length of a book. With her hand on The Master and Margarita, she insists that she needs books because they are all she has. The physical gesture grounds the claim in a particular book, while the breadth of her examples makes the refuge portable: any story capable of carrying her elsewhere can serve.

Lee’s response is to look at her as though he feels sorry for her. The moment leaves the value of reading unresolved between them. Maren has described it as a necessary resource, not a remedy, and the pity she perceives does not cancel that need. Their exchange also makes clear that reading is not a shared habit between them: Lee has not been formed by bedtime stories or novels in the way Maren has, and the meaning she assigns to books has to be explained rather than assumed.

Books among borrowed things

The importance of books appears alongside Maren’s experience of temporary interiors and borrowed belongings. At Mrs. Harmon’s home, while Lee and Sully consult a road atlas at the kitchen table, Maren tries to knit with Mrs. Harmon’s yarn and needles. She manages to cast on twenty stitches but becomes hopelessly mixed up on the next row. She puts the work aside and explores the end table: a deck of cards, a book of Mad Libs, The Midwest Bird-Watching Guide, and jacks. In the cabinet she finds a basket like Mrs. Harmon’s, with a crochet hook tucked into bright red acrylic yarn. The scene does not make every pastime equivalent to reading; rather, it places books among the small, ordinary materials of a home she is visiting, while her failed knitting attempt marks how difficult it is to adopt another household’s habits by simply taking up its tools.

Elsewhere, Maren’s questions about the future sharpen the distinction between imagined lives and the uncertain one she must continue living. She wonders whether she will still be living in other people’s homes years later, whether she will travel with someone or alone, and whether she will be able to travel at all. She also asks whether she can ever make peace with who she is and what she has done. Thinking through those questions exhausts her; instead of answering them, she replaces the yearbooks on the shelf, takes out her notebook, and begins to write. The notebook is not presented as another fictional life in the same way as a novel. It is a different response to the pressure of her own story: where reading offers temporary inhabitation elsewhere, writing gives her a way to put her own thoughts into words.

The library as refuge and routine

Later, Maren uses Kerri-Ann Watt’s identification card to enter the university library. She wears all of Kerri-Ann’s black clothes, even her underwear, and no one checks whether her face matches the photograph on the card. She flashes the card to a bored student at the front desk and passes through the turnstile into the biggest library she has ever seen. The entry depends on borrowed identity as well as on reading: Kerri-Ann’s card gets Maren through the door, and the library gives her access to a space where she can spend hours among books.

After reading for a couple of hours, Maren walks through the stacks to stretch her legs. She notices carts full of books needing to be put back and begins reshelving them because no one seems to be doing the work. The task soothes her. She is not merely escaping into other people’s stories; she is handling and arranging the books that other people have used, putting them back in order. That modest labor gives her a practical role in the place, even as she remains there under someone else’s identification. Its significance lies in the contrast between concealment at the entrance and the quiet usefulness she finds once inside.

The library also makes a form of ordinary social life visible to her without immediately making it available. Maren likes the town and campus, and notices the cafeteria’s dark wood, Gothic lettering, and terrace overlooking the lake. She sees three girls knitting together there, but says she cannot talk to people. When one asks whether she knits, Maren explains that she tried and could not get the hang of it. The girl reassures her that everyone feels that way at first and invites her to sit down so she can teach her. The invitation offers a possible connection beyond solitary reading; the passage records the welcome, not whether Maren accepts it or learns to knit.

Being seen while reading

A later moment with Lee shows that Maren’s immersion in books is visible to someone else. She picks up Kerri-Ann’s copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but cannot concentrate because she feels Lee watching her. When she asks what is wrong, he says that he loves the look on her face while she reads, as if she really is somewhere else. Maren asks whether he watches her; he explains that she becomes so absorbed she never notices. His observation gives her private description of reading a second witness. The elsewhere she enters is not only an idea she offers Lee in conversation; it appears on her face as sustained attention.

The episode also complicates the notion of books as mere escape. Lee sees the pleasure and absorption of reading, while Maren remains conscious of being watched and asks what he wants. He seems about to say something more, but instead counts money, and she returns to the book. The exchange ends not with an explanation of what either of them feels, but with the familiar act of reading resumed. Across these scenes, books do not erase Maren’s precarious circumstances or settle her questions about the future. They give her a temporary life elsewhere, and, in the library, a repeatable daily practice within a place she likes. That combination—escape without a cure, and routine without security—is what makes reading necessary to her.