Shannon Kavanagh reflects on harmonizing life with literature.

At the age of ten, I watched someone die.

Granted, it was Piggy in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but the barrier of fiction meant little as I slowly closed the paperback and stared, wide-eyed as a young boy without his glasses, out at the nothingness of the school library. Someone who had been alive – on the pages of a novel or not – was now dead and I had done nothing to save him. I was a pre-teen accessory to murder.

Growing up a ‘big reader’, as over a decade of school reports proclaimed of me, I was hardly the most realistic of my peers. It probably isn’t the biggest surprise, given the fact that I was raised by vampires, evil or noble monarchs, and Dorian Gray. At twelve, I was introduced to my first literary Satan. Some time before that, however, I had discovered that they had sex in books too, and the influence that had on relationships years later I haven’t the confidence to ask.

Even when you’re not a Year Six pupil convinced your mother is poisoning you because of something you read in Flowers in the Attic, anyone who grew up with their nose in a book will know the difficulty involved in the sudden realisation that there’s a world out there. Fairy tales taught us about bravery and true love, not GCSEs and heartbreak.

This isn’t to say that there’s nothing to be gained from the world of a good book (or even a really terrible one). I won’t hesitate to say that the best of nearly twenty years of books has shaped me, and I’m fairly sure that that’s for the better, at least half of the time.

That being said, I, like so many others, could have done without that second in my life, when I finally raised my eyes and saw the word ‘fiction’ above the shelf. It didn’t actually happen like that. But even so, I can say without doubt that so much reading gave me very unrealistic expectations for various areas of life that often, in hindsight, I could have done without.

When I was fifteen, I met my first girlfriend, and a few months later at sixteen I told my mum I was bisexual. Having already devoured stacks of LGBT fiction by this point, my head was full of parental rejection, brain-meltingly passionate love making, and – of course – brutal murder. I was fairly sure she wasn’t about to shoot me or send me out into the streets to fend for myself and join a gang, but nothing I’d read prepared me for her actual reaction.

In the event, my mum shrugged, said ‘alright’, and went back to making dinner. (And, in the event, even less could have prepared me for what would be my dad’s reaction three years later – to raise his eyebrows over his laptop and ask if that meant I was into threesomes).

The biggest problem, I’ve found, in spending a little too much time with your childhood literary heroes is the way it makes the ordinary appear completely uninteresting. I would find myself on buses, making up short stories about everything and everyone I saw. My own life was boring, so I had to make do with the exciting (though admittedly, often mundane) lives of the people I was beginning to write myself.

Eventually, though, I slowly started to come to terms with the insistence of the real world to keep existing around me. I realised that the parts of my life that actually did resemble slightly over-the-top fiction were the parts that I was desperate to do without. I also realised that – once you’ve got your homework in at least – life is more or less what you make it.

I wasn’t about to start stealing spiders from circuses or hanging around local elderly men in case they died and revealed an apartment full of mysterious notes about an even more mysterious house. I was, however, more or less over my jealousy and an awful lot less confused. I proved myself by treating books academically, applying to university, leaving home, going clubbing.

That being said, I never have completely let go of that girl who cried for the fictional characters she saw die, the reading minority in her North London primary school. Granted no one gives me stickers for picking up books anymore, but that isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Rather, I – like so many others – came to realise that real life can be just as brilliant as fiction.

Sometimes, and I hope Tyler Durden, Dorian Gray, and Declan Gunn will forgive me, it’s even better.