TRANSCRIPT
Welcome, everyone, and a special welcome to those of you who are graduating this weekend, and the friends and family members of the graduates. I'm Judy Frank, Eliza, J. Clark Folger Professor of English here at Amherst College. It's a great honor and a special pleasure for me to introduce today's speaker three-time, National Book Award Finalist, New York Times Bestselling Author, and my former student, Lauren Groff. Aww. I know, right?
Widely recognized as one of the most influential voices in contemporary literature. Lauren, who graduated from Amherst in 2001, will receive a second degree from the college tomorrow, an honorary doctorate. Lauren is the author of two extraordinary short story collections, and five critically acclaimed novels, including Fates and Furies, Arcadia, Matrix, and most recently, the Vaster Wilds. She's the recipient of a long list of prizes, the Story Prize, the American Booksellers Association Indies' Choice Award, New Literary Projects, Joyce Carol, Oates Prize, and France's Grand Prix de l'Heroïne, just to name a few. Her novels have appeared twice on Barack Obama's favorite books of the year. His list: Fates in Furies in 2015 and Matrix in 2021.
These accolades can only hint at what a deep pleasure it is to read Lauren's work. Marked by gorgeous prose, playful narrative inventiveness, and fearless exploration of the complexities of human experience, her narratives provoke us to reflect critically on the world around us and our place in it. In an expression of the fierce ambition and commitment to craft of writing that bristles on every page, Lauren has remarked that she aims, "for each subsequent book to destroy the one that came before it."
To Lauren reading literature is a way to expand the soul. In her words, "It's where we encounter the great, eternal, gorgeous mysteries that we should all be engaged with on a daily basis." So perhaps it's no surprise that in the face of a surge of book bans in her home state, Lauren opened a bookstore in Gainesville, Florida just last month. She will tell us more about that adventure today.
Her talk is called Free People Read Freely. Please join me in welcoming Lauren Groff.
Well, hello. I just want to shout out that I have all my Amherst merch right here. This is amazing.
Okay, so, this is so moving. I'm standing in front of you today wearing many identities, the first as an Amherst alumna, for whom this gorgeous place, Johnston Chapel, has an almost holy significance. This is where I had my own commencement, and matriculation, and prize convocations, as well as being the very spot, right about here, where I watched my husband, Clay Coleman, a 2000 alum, back when he was still a stranger to me, singing the Zumbyes for the first time, and I felt an electric zap in my bones. He was wearing a giant banana costume. It was incredibly attractive.
I'm also here as a writer of fiction, a life vocation that I discovered in a classroom, in this very building, with my beloved professor Dr. Judy Frank, who showed me work by contemporary writers for the first time in my life. Almost unbelievably, nearly all the books I'd read up until that point had somehow been written by dead people. In particular, Dr. Frank revealed the great glories of my best, beloved form, the short story form. Introducing me to Alice Monroe, Grace Paley, Toni Cade Bambara, Laurie Moore, and on and on, people who still shine in the darkness like lighthouses to me.
So I stand here, finally, as a passionate citizen, who has watched with horror as the slow creep of authoritarianism has moved across the face of my adoptive state of Florida, until I was at last spurred to action. Just last month. In response to over 5,000 book titles, challenged and banned across the state of Florida, Clay and I opened the Lynx, a general interest bookstore with a special focus on banned books, LGBTQI+ books, books by Black, and Indigenous and marginalized writers, books that talk about actual history, even the stuff that makes people who live in privilege, people like me, feel bad about themselves.
It's primarily in this last identity as a bookseller in an embattled state that I will be speaking to you today. My purpose is not to spook or scare you, but to make you aware of what is happening in my state and how it is already spreading to other states, even ostensibly progressive ones like Massachusetts. I would like to fill you with a zeal to protect the right to free expression, which is under immense and growing attack right now.
So, here's what's been happening in the state of Florida, the worst bad actor in the book banning battles that we're seeing being waged across the country. Florida is always the best at being the worst. The second worst is Texas, with about 3000 challenged and banned books, so we're the worst by 2000 books. In counties across the Sunshine state, a few radical individuals are lobbying, and succeeding, in pulling books off the shelves of public libraries as well as public school classrooms and libraries. This is yet another case of a very tiny minority, only about a dozen people in all, imposing their limited imagination and will upon the majority, who, in fact, do not book bans. In fact, 85% of Floridians find book bans harmful.
The books that these people object to are largely works that describe sex, or gender, or LGBTQI themes or books whose only apparently offensive nature is that they were written by Black, Brown, and Indigenous authors. Books by Toni Morrison, one of North America's greatest literary geniuses of all history, have been challenged and banned. Plays by William Shakespeare have been banned. Other, well-known challenged and banned books include the Handmaid's Tale, Animal Farm, 1984, the Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the House on Mango Street, and even the dictionary for including the word sex. I wish I were kidding. It's so bad. This list goes on and on.
So this is harmful on the most basic level, because even though in my household, and probably in many of yours, books are an absolute necessity, they are expensive to buy, and many people rely on their local libraries and schools for the reading material. It's a deeply lonely thing to not be able to find yourself reflected in the reading material you have on hand, to feel unseen and un-included in depictions of what normal looks like.
The state of Florida, with its notorious Don't Say Gay bill, with its systematic destruction of diversity and inclusion offices in nearly all of the public universities in Florida, with its punitive laws, with its redefinition of slavery in high school textbooks to try to emphasize the skills that enslaved people gained under the yoke of their oppression, and this is not a joke either. The state of Florida itself has encouraged and empowered a tiny group of people to hold Floridians hostage. We are collectively telegraphing to gay, transgender, Black, and Brown people all throughout the state that they're unwelcome and unloved by their home state, that they should stay quiet and feel shame about who they are.
Just as terrifying is that the rules and laws about all this are so downright confusing that they're blowing a damp and freezing wind across the state, causing well-meaning librarians and school teachers to feel the chill. This became particularly acute after the state openly considered charging teachers with felonies for grooming if they were discovered to have books in their classrooms with LGBTQI+ themes, this extreme chill has forced many to censor their own classrooms and libraries preemptively. The number, because it is preemptive and done privately, is not one that can be counted, but it's exponentially larger than the official count of challenged or banned books.
Clay and I have a fifth grade teacher friend named Laura Maxwell, she's as progressive as a human gets, and she teaches language arts and history. She used to be able to teach about the Holocaust by giving her students Art Spiegelman's great graphic novel Mouse, but she no longer feels as though she can even keep it on her classroom shelves, because she's afraid of a parent coming in, seeing it, and complaining with the result that she loses her job, which she loves and she's good at.
She's not alone. Many of our educators and librarians have limited what they can bring to their children on their own. Even more are afraid to speak out in opposition to what's going on. Let's not lose sight of the fact that banning books, though it is truly the sharp side of the wedge of much larger and darker authoritarian impositions by the state, is also an immense distraction from other egregious ways the state is stripping power from its people.
I believe that if the people enacting the bans and challenges actually cared about other people's children, they would ban the things that would actually maim and kill children every day, and that would be guns. But shockingly, there's an area peeped from them about the wildly sensible solution of banning guns. If these people actually cared about the well-being of children, they would ensure that every single child had enough to eat, and stable housing, and excellent medical care, and free education from birth to graduate school. If these people cared about the moral and spiritual well-being of children, they would work hard to halt the catastrophic climate change that we are imposing upon the world right now, which is bringing the entire human experiment to the brink of failure. Instead, they're making enormous noise, they're casting a huge, dark shadow.
In that shadow, people are having fundamental human rights stripped from them like the right to have bodily autonomy and to make our own healthcare choices, as well as the right to have access to excellent and free water, air, and nature, which belongs to all of us and not to great international corporations.
In my state of Florida, under the cover of darkness, in the near total deterioration of the newspapers that used to be the citizen's watchdogs, our freshwater springs have been sold for pennies to corporations like Nestle, which will encase the water and plastic and sell it back to us for profit. This is to say that both things are true at the same time, that this push to ban books is an enormous distraction, a sort of ledger domain designed to make you look at one hand while the other is picking your pocket. And that unless we stop it, right now, in its tracks, it's a harbinger of far darker times of basic human rights being stripped from the bodies of its most vulnerable citizens.
I am also well aware that book bans and challenges are not even close to the worst authoritarian move that can be made against a populace. For instance, all abortion in Florida has been banned after six weeks of gestation, which is an effective ban on all abortion as most people don't even know they're pregnant at week six, which begins to be counted from the last day of the previous menstruation. This ban on what should be routine, safe healthcare is causing radical, and material, and lifelong harm to both mothers and the babies being brought into the world without parents who want them or have the ability to care for them. So worse things than book bans are already happening.
At the same time, I do want to say that book bans have historically been at the beginning of far, far worse humanitarian crises. A student of history watches it time and time again. Before wars and genocides, the fastest way to sow hatred for individual populations is to begin with banning works by and about said populations. The great German poet, Heinrich Heine, said in 1829, [foreign language 00:12:11] or, "In those places where people burn books, they will also one day burn people." Of course, 120 years later, the Nazis began by burning Heinrich Heine's books, among many others, and eventually, as we all know, they did murder and burn millions of people. So this is the tip of a vast and terrifying wedge. What is to come will be worse if we don't stop it, so it's contingent on us to stop it now.
"All well and good, Lauren" you may be saying, "but how do we stop the dangerous spread of intolerance?" And I have to tell you as a person on the ground in Florida that I have a great deal of hope. For one, I'm fired up and in love with this generation of college students. I love you guys so much. Across the country, across this world, you're standing up loudly for what you believe in, even if it comes with considerable personal cost. You students in the audience are so wildly more sophisticated than we students were 20 some odd years ago. And many of you are already active and aware citizens, and you're doing the primary job of citizens, which is to organize against injustice where you see it.
I'm so heartened to know that so many of you'll continue to be deeply engaged in your communities in large and small ways going forward, so thank you. But beyond this wave of young activists like you, I'm glad to see that excellent organizations are stepping forward, like Florida Freedom to Read. And though I know PEN America is having a crisis of leadership at the moment, they do in fact have an office in Miami that is exclusively devoted to the crisis of book banning. Bookmobiles like RuPaul's are driving around the state tossing out banned books like parade candy.
Our store, the Lynx, too, has a banned book's treasury and we're aiming to become the Dolly Partons of Florida. And those of you who don't know it, Dolly Parton is an actual angel upon this planet and she has given away hundreds of millions of books to Americans.
The best thing we can do, however, is for us all to become engaged individual citizens. We need to strengthen and support our school boards by making sure pro freedom of speech people are elected, we need to be aware of the mechanisms by which our separate book challenge systems are enacted in our own counties, and I cannot emphasize this loudly enough, you have to show up to the hearings. Book banners take advantage of how boring and Byzantine the system is, but the board's mandate is to hold the community's judgment on these books to uphold it, and if the community doesn't show up, the banners will, and they will win. So when a book is banned in your community, you have to know about it, and you have to tell others about it, and you have to show up to the hearings.
We also need parents to step up. I'm a parent of two unbelievably wonderful adolescent boys, one is 15 and one's 13, and I believe very deeply that there's nothing that a good parent cannot talk to their children about. That, in fact, this crisis of book challenges is a crisis of truly and outrageously bad parenting on the side of the book banners. If parents don't like what is in a book, it is contingent upon said parents to have these conversations with their children, to contextualize, to clarify, to define the moral limits that they want their children to emulate.
If your thirteen-year-old daughter reads Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, that's an excellent time to have a conversation about sex, and consent, and the destructive side of human desire. If your six-year-old finds the more egregiously racist editions of Tintin on the shelves, it's a good time to talk about colonialism, and racism, and empire and the way we know things now that were not well understood in the past. If parents cannot do that, if they cannot find the time, or patience, or love to have these hard conversations with their children, it's a profound moral failure to impose their own parenting on the children of strangers. We don't get to do that in this country.
And anyway, we all really should talk to our children about sex, and other religions, and race, and the things we may not want them exposed to by other people because children are brilliant as a collective bloc, and they will find a way to access all these things on the internet whether we want them to or not. Our sons are slippery as heck and have figured out ways to sneak around every child control that exists on the internet.
As the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne tells us, "To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it." In fact, the video game Minecraft, which is accessible in every country on the planet, and is one of the most popular cultural phenomena of the last decades, in Minecraft, there is a banned books library containing thousands of books where kids can read whatever banned books they choose.
It's delightful to me to think that an adolescent who has denied the right to read the number one most banned book in the United States, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, that child can read the book in its entirety, all while pretending to be battling the Ender Dragon. Imagine all these little revolutionaries sprawled around the living room reading James Baldwin when their parents are playing Candy Crush, or watching Love Island on their own devices.
Also, though books can be stripped out of our hands, I do have to say that, as a whole, they're almost impossible to repress. I've made my life in books. I have built a gorgeous Cathedral of literature around myself. I've appointed myself Priestess of this particular cult, and I can tell you, here I am swinging my sensor enchanting the liturgy that books are the greatest technology that humans have ever developed, that no matter how many kinds of screens, and holograms, and AI uncanny valleys we create, we will never make any technology that could be better than the humble codex built out of dead trees and words. The greatest books are a way to take a human soul and transplant it, in part, into another human soul. In that fertile ground, the seeds sprout and become luscious, a whole jungle of sui generis plants. I read Dante Alighieri, and George Eliot, and Haruki Murakami, and Jhumpa Lahiri, and Diane Seuss, and Anne Carson, and Herman Melville. And I will forever after, until the end of my days, hear their voices sing in a chorus in my mind.
Literature is among the greatest gifts people have given back to humanity. Books are the sweetest balm to soothe the inherent existential loneliness of being on this planet. And when people find something so essential to the project of understanding what it means to be human, they will fight to the death to keep that thing and to preserve it for the people that they love.
Clay and I have been consistently moved to tears by the wholehearted excitement that has been beaming our way ever since we announced the project of the Lynx. We've received so many testimonials by trans and LGBTQI+ folks and their loved ones about the light they can now see in a landscape that for many years has been so oppressive and dark. We've been given so many offers to lend a hand that we can hardly keep up with them.
As a person who prides herself on hard-headed self-sufficiency and competency, as a person who has a hard time asking anyone for any kind of help, one of the greatest lessons I've learned is that people deep down want so very badly to work for the greater good. Often they're just waiting to learn how to be helpful. All we have to do is ask. It takes a vulnerability I didn't have until my forties to understand that if you're brave enough to ask people for love, people will respond with love.
So this is what I want to leave you with today. No matter if you're a matriculating student, or parents, or member of Amherst faculty, if you engage with the world with radical generosity and openness, and a willingness to engage with ideas and literature and people who, or that, may be at first difficult for you, well, I won't lie, there will be times when you'll be hurt a little, but for the most part, you absolutely will be shown generosity and openness in response.
Please don't meet people with cynicism. Please don't dismiss before you engage. Please don't participate in shutting down avenues of free expression. These things only diminish your own soul. We have to allow others grace. It's only by giving others grace that we discover freedom for ourselves. This does take courage, it's true, but just look at you right now. You have so much courage that this gorgeous, old building is gleaming with it. You're to offer the world your light.
Okay, thank you.
So I will gladly take questions, or comments, and you might at the end turn it into a question with a little hook. That'd be awesome. But questions... Usually in the US when I say "the first person to ask a question wins" we get someone. Does someone want to win? Nobody wants to win? Is this Amherst? Oh, look! You win!
Just one second. Sorry.
I just wonder what your thoughts are in that stage, you opened this bookstore, what kind of controversy in some of your writing and how are you planning to deal with the... I don't know...
The controversy? Well, so far, knock on wood, there've really only been really mild controversies in the bookstore.
The day that we opened, someone did sneak in and put flyers in some of the books that people write. Much of it's so silly and passive-aggressive. All you can do is laugh. I do know that when we do Drag Time story hours, we're going to need actual security, which is just something that you have to have. We're going to have to have a group of people outside with umbrellas, keeping the wrong people out, but we can do it. We're good.
My entire staff has been trained in deescalation, which is really wonderful. And if it comes to the point where the bookstore, the books, there's some sort of law against selling a lot of these books, I am so happy to go to jail, because I have a really big platform and I can make people very, very angry. So, please arrest me. I would love for this to happen. I would love to be the scapegoat for these people. It'd be amazing.
So yeah, so far we haven't really gotten a lot of protesters, but it will surely happen. One of our... So our MO is to allow for the free spread of ideas, so we're getting a lot of speakers in. We are putting a lot of books out into the culture. We're trying to find the corners of the state where there's a lot of repression happening and trying to throw love in books in that direction. And we are basically a symbol right now, as well as a lighthouse, in the state of Florida telling the rest of the country, and the rest of the state, that not all Florida is made up of people who hate you. There are people in the state who love you and this is a space for you, basically.
Thank you. Yes. Sorry.
[inaudible 00:23:56] Dolly Parton the angel.
Yes. I mentioned Dolly Parton, the angel. I did.
Have you met her?
Have I met her? I would not be alive if I met Dolly Parton. No, I would die. I love her so much. She wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You in 24 hours. What kind of genius? That's amazing. No, I haven't met her, but I would like to see if she could give us more books to give out. Give us help, Dolly. If anyone knows her, let me know. Yeah.
There's a question back there.
I liked her talk very much. Thank you.
Thank you.
And I'm going to use some of those ideas with my own students, but you talk about banned books. Banned books are banned because of the ideas, obviously, in them. And we have a lot of ideas that are being banned in our own community, as we know. Whether they're political or cultural or so on and so forth. And we probably all know of some very immediate ones at hand.
How would you recommend an institution, or simply educators like myself for example, to work with students in trying to encourage openness about discussing banned subjects and both in the political, cultural, social spheres? Any practical ideas?
Oh my God. I'm not an educator, unfortunately. I wish I, well. No, I don't wish I were. I was at one point, and so that's a very difficult question. I actually don't know, but Judy Frank will. So, want to tell me how to do it?
I do think encouraging openness and debate with respect in every level, from the time that children are in nursery school up to the time that they're in graduate school, it's very, very necessary. And to make sure that you, as an educator, create a place of safety, which means that you have to make sure that the students are comfortable debating, and knowing that when they debate, there's not a lot of ad hominem attacks, there's no judgments. Well, as few as possible. It is really trying to understand the matter from all sides.
That's a very tricky tightrope, and I'm so sorry that you have to walk it, but you're going to have to. It's a lot.
Hi.
So first I want to say I hope you get arrested.
Oh, thank you. I do, too.
My daughter says if she had my arrestability, she'd be getting arrested all the time. So I share your arrestability and I hope the best for that.
I hope I don't, but that would be fine if I do.
But I wanted to ask, I think the idea of having to have security for a bookstore is crazy. And I'm thinking about some of the dialogue on campuses, and something that has been said on some campuses is to tell people to "stay in their lane." And I'm sure that you've heard this many times about just write your books and don't do this kind of stuff.
And I think there are ways in which particular staff, or administrators, or professors who have a completely different field are told that there's a limitation to what their freedom of speech is, or their academic freedom is, that they have to stay in their lane. And I'm wondering how you think about that and the advice you give for this fostering of really robust and free wonderful dialogue. It doesn't seem like you feel like you have a lane.
No, I think that when you're engaged with making art, you're inherently political no matter what. And if you think you're not political, that's a political statement in and of itself. It means that you're blind... Or not... Sorry, that's an ableist way of saying it. You're not seeing the way that your actions are affecting other people.
So, I know that all of my work is engaged with political ideas. The delineation of political ideas is political as well. I do see that my citizenship is different from my artist nature, so I'm not trying to write books with any kind of polemical intent, because those, to be perfectly frank, are incredibly boring.
I read plenty of utopian books to write Arcadia, and I never want to do that in my entire life again, read them, let alone engage with them. But I do think that standing up for the things that you think are right as a citizen, that's incredibly important. And I think that there is a demarcation between what you do in your job and what you do as a person. And I think it's contingent on all of us as citizens to stand up for what is right as citizens. Whether or not that has any bearing on your job, I can't say. This is a very private and very personal thing. But I do think not succumbing to the things that are wrong is just as important as doing things that are right, not agreeing in a complicit way to wrong things.
We all have to find that balance for ourselves. I'm the same person whether I write a book or open a bookstore, it's just that I do them in radically different periods of time. In the morning, I'm a writer. In the afternoon, I become a bookstore owner with a mission. I'm sorry, I can't answer that definitively. I wish I could. There's no pill.
I wanted to ask about banned books that maybe the reason they've been banned, or the reason we don't want to necessarily teach them now has changed over time. And I'm thinking particularly like Huck Finn, where you talked about Tintin, and I was wondering how you handle that in your bookstore.
Do you carry those sort of books, or are there conversations around it?
We carry those books. We are for free expression. That said, we don't have to... We're a private business, and so we don't have to carry anything by Ron DeSantis, for instance. We just don't have to. Or by Donald Trump, we don't have to. Huck Finn is an interesting example, because a lot of people hate it because it has the n-word, as it's a really reactive, horrible word.
I do think that if my kids were to read it, which I think they have, the conversation has to be had in the home, which is about, at a certain point, people use this word more freely. It's really offensive. They listen to rap, they know what the word is, and the weight of it. I think in a private business you have the ability to allow some books on the shelves and others not.
I will order any book for anyone if they want to buy it through my store, even if it's the most offensive, even if it's a Ron DeSantis book, I will order it for the person who will buy it. That doesn't mean I have to put it on my shelves.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for the bookstore. Thank you for your words.
I am curious about... I loved what you said about books transplanting one soul into another person's soul. And because books are kind of these empathy engines, do you see any connection between people reading less and the rise in intolerance? And just a broader question about... I'm in publishing, so I'm very concerned, not just about people not reading banned books, but people not reading at all. So how do we take this exquisite technology, compete with all these other technologies, compete for attention, frankly, in this world?
So thank you for working in publishing. I know it's fraught at the moment. I do have to say I don't actually think people are reading less. If you look at the number of words that they're reading, it's more than ever in the history of the world. They're just reading them on screens. That's a problem. But at the same time, just the same quantity of books are being sold. They're shorter books. So there is a material effect on people's attention spans and where they're finding their information. Most information is found online now, to the detriment of our newspapers and our publishing houses.
I have to say, there will always be people incredibly passionate about books, and they may not be books that you and I love, but that doesn't matter. There's a place in the world for... I don't think she's here. I'm not going to say it. I was going to be snotty. I'm not going to do it. There's a place in the world for entertainment, entertainment that I don't like and I wouldn't give to my own kids, but I think that a lot of those books are selling really, really rapidly and very, very well.
So I really think it's the job of all of us to put love out in the world toward real literature, really good books, and talk up those things, so that maybe someone who comes in loving Colleen Hoover will end up loving Alice Monroe. That's not a far leap. Some people just have to be nudged in that direction.
So I have a great deal of faith, I think that people inherently read all the time, and it's really just about marketing, to be honest, to push them into the books that you and I love and want them to read. And marketing, marketing's marketing. We can do that. It's easy.
Is there another? There was a hand up in the front row.
I have just a question about your experience at Amherst. First of all, thank you for coming back.
Talk about, if you could, an academic experience you had here, outside your major, that was meaningful or important to you.
Oh my God. Amherst was the best thing for me. Actually, we got up very, very early this morning, my husband and I, because we're actually in Australia time. We just got back here yesterday. So we were wandering around in the dawn across this incredible campus, and I felt so profoundly moved. When you come to a place that you love so deeply, and you see the changes and they're changes for the better, it's so deep and moving.
I would have to say I absolutely love every English class I ever took. Judy Frank changed my life forever. All my French classes changed my life as well. The classes that I didn't think I would love are the ones that have stuck with me probably the longest, to be honest. So, I took a neuroscience class, which I am not a scientist, but I still think about a lot of the ideas that were announced to me at that time.
I think the vast freedom here to follow whatever inkling or joy that you want to follow is such a gift. And I didn't discover it again in my life until I was able to just become a full-time writer, and really just read whatever books I wanted, and go down whatever rabbit holes I wanted. My whole life has been trying to replicate the Amherst experience, and I can't, because I don't teach myself as well as the professors here teach, unfortunately. But you can read a lot of good books, for sure.
Let me see. Oh, the other thing, too, is if there's still undergraduates here, have more fun. I didn't have enough fun in college. I really didn't. You got to live more, you really do. Don't just study all the time.
Is there anything else? No? Okay. Wait, there's... Please, no, I'm so happy. Yes, I'm happy to answer anything. I have no filter. It's all good.
How did end up in Florida?
How did I end up in Florida? I ask myself that every day.
So my husband, he's a very smart man, sitting right there, eventually took over a family business. And what I didn't realize about a family business is that it is a golden cage, and you can't get out of it unless really terrible things happen, which they haven't yet. So, we're stuck forever.
So one thing is that you can try to flee, or the other thing is you can try to make your place more beautiful, and we're trying to make it more beautiful, and flee. Sorry, I can answer your question. Thanks. We have time.
Thank you for your talk. I was just curious, this energy to ban books just seems extreme. Do you have a sense as where it's coming from and how it might dissipate or where it might go?
It's coming directly from the state. So it's coming from the state government who made laws, especially with a Don't Say Gay bill, that allow these book bans to happen. So it's a very much a cynical attempt to do two things.
One is to make a lot of noise so that worse things can happen, because it makes people very upset to do book bans. But two, it's the beginning part of a much larger... It's a wedge, and it's the wedge that will make other worse things happen. This is very intentional, and they're doing it very, very intentionally through the Florida legislature. In other places, it's happening more organically on the ground in specific counties, in specific school districts. So even in Australia, all Australia was really angry when we were there, because in one place in Sydney, they banned a book for LGBTQI+ themes and Australians do not like that. They don't like that at all. So they felt very passionate about it.
I think one thing is that, because there are 5,000 banned and challenged books in Florida, there are too many to keep up with. And so it's this avalanche, this onslaught, and we were delayed in attacking it back, to be perfectly honest. So here you have to be preemptive. You actually have to watch and make sure that these things are not happening in other places. You have to be aware of what's going on in your school boards.
And then... No, please.
I just had another question about the thinking about a kid losing themselves in a book, and many of us who did that as children think back to that moment and try to recover that. I'm thinking about what you said about being a student at Amherst in that moment. You're just in it. And if you have thoughts now, maybe this may be asking for something on, I don't know, that you can't answer, but thoughts about how to foster that, how to reconnect with that, how to give that gift to people around you, or to ourselves.
So I can only speak from my own experience, which is that my parents were glorious parents, in that they just let us read whatever we wanted, and we got a lot of free time to do it, too. And I think that's one thing why young people are having a hard time reading as much as people in the past did. They don't have any free time. They're super over scheduled, going from here to there. You actually need a great deal of time to wander over to a bookshelf, and pull something down, and start it, and get lost and engrossed in something that you didn't think that you would love.
So I think that it's a couple of things. It's the loss of free time, and the loss of indirection. And these things... We are so capitalistic, we think that we need to fill all of our time with productivity, but I think actually being lost in a book, or being lost in creating art, any kind of art, you require a great deal of plank time, of imagination time, of sheer nothing time. And that's when the work actually gets done.
As an Amherst graduate, I didn't give myself enough at that time, but I got more later, just out of sheer luck, to be honest. When I was a kid, I went to my parents' shelves and pulled down Middlemarch, which my mom read in college, and that became my favorite book of all times, not because anyone steered me there, but because it was just there. So that's what I do with my kids. I don't really over-schedule them. They have sports, because if they don't, they're insane people. But beyond that, we don't really require much of them.
Thank you.
All right, now for real. We're done. Okay. Thank you, everyone.
