To Fill an Open Wound
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Greetings, my fellow bibliophiles!
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
.Edward writes a mixture of fiction and non-fiction on his Substack,
. As a long-term subscriber, I’ve particularly enjoyed his analysis of the Harry Potter series and Cormac McCarthy’s work, but really the thing that keeps me returning to his writing is the utterly infectious prose. Edward writes with such ferocious dynamism that it’s like being hit over the head with a verbose baseball bat. In a good way.When I first read the piece you’re about to read, I said aloud to myself, in an empty, “Holy sh*t.” I’ll say no more about it and just let you read - enjoy!
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I was nine years old when my dark night of the soul fell upon me. The child I was interrogated himself and found no faith or belief inside. I cried through the night, still believing in damnation, wrecked by this uncontrollable and spontaneous apostasy. I offered a deal, in the dark, in the depths, with this god of all.
He could send my soul to hell so long as this sacrifice saved my family.
Growing up in a traditional and very religious family, I kept this to myself the way I kept almost everything to myself. Religion coursed through our house. The doors framed by holy water founts, the walls lined with religious art and iconography, the rosaries resting beside the living room chairs, and the bookcases full of theology bellowed belief loudly into my tiny body, my hollow chest.
And I sat there among them, unbeliever. I went to mass and served his altar and said the words and took the eucharist and sacraments, lying in every moment I did not turn away. Sacrilege piled round me, dropping like petals from desiccated flowers.
Books became a haven for me, opening up worlds and possibilities. From the moment my brother taught me to read, books filled my life, filled me with new light. All these words, these worlds, gave me hope. And when my mother gifted Tolkien to me, I discovered new hope in language, in stories.
And then I learned the sound of my shattering heart and the lies I could not stop performing became habitual, became fundamental to survival. Unbeliever that I was, I told no one. Had no one. I feared telling my siblings in case they told our parents. Feared revealing this gaping hole inside me.
And so I wandered the school library, looking for better lies to fill myself with. There I found Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, which was perfect for the child I was. It promised to open new worlds, reveal vast canopies to hide within. On top of that, I was a young boy with an inflated sense of his own intelligence, so a book about a genius boy saving humanity seemed about right.
And I got that from it. But I was given something stranger and darker as well. Something that burrowed inside that god-shaped hole in my eleven year old body.
But it was the sequel that went on to change who I was.
There have been several books in my life that have severed me from the person I was when first I opened them. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is one. Robin Hobb’s Royal Assassin is another. Dexter Palmer’s Version Control is a third. Beowulf, upon reading the fifth translation, is still another.
But it began here, in many ways, with Speaker for the Dead.
Still a child full of fear and doubt. A child full of unutterable secrets. Inexplicable hopes. I knew people could shatter my heart.
Didn’t know books could do the same. Didn’t know words on a page could mean so much to me, could pierce me so deeply, could leave me weeping, spilling tears into those thin and yellowed paperback pages.
I remember the feel of that book. The dry pages creaked and crinkled. The binding so worn and abused that I handled it like scholars I’d one day see in Trinity College holding illuminated manuscripts.
Didn’t want to break that binding or bruise another white line down its spine. I opened the pages only slightly, trying to leave as little mark of my passing as possible.
But before this book could fill the wound so deep inside me, my dad found me reading it and read the title and snatched it away from me and demanded to know what this was.
It was only a book, I said, lyingly.
It didn’t appease him. The title and its Mormon author were enough. Its synopsis that included a new kind of priesthood made it banishable, punishable. He took it away and locked it away from me.
Furious and near tears, I held it in. Decided to show no one. Didn’t allow him to know the ways this hurt. For I already knew the sound of my shattering, but I didn’t need to let anyone else hear it.
And so I waited. And when I found the chance, I scoured my parents’ room, found this precious book, and stole it back. Hurrying back to my room, breathing heavy but trying not to, I delicately opened it back up and continued reading. My brother who I shared a room with knew what happened and so I hid my reading from him too, in case he told on me.
Books had never had a hold on him. Even still, they mean little to the man he has become.
Trust, long dissolved. Suspicion reigned. Rather than confide in one another over our shared lives, we hid away from one another.
Feverishly, I poured through the rest of the book, swallowing it whole. And when Ender revealed himself, I felt it fingering that festering hole inside me. When he wept, I felt my chest caving in. No tears yet, for books weren’t made for crying. At least not for me. Not yet.
And then Human, the small alien creature longing for hope, for his people’s future, leapt into the air only to come crashing down.
It was this moment that shattered what remained of me. Prepared me to be rebuilt.
I wept for Human. For the person that he was. I saw that, then. Though he was an alien—a pequenino, the small piglike humanoid creatrues at the center of the novel—he was as human as any other person—living or fictional—that I’d ever encountered.
His shattered hope, the immensity of his loss, wounded me and my tears came to stain that tattered library edition.
It’s what made me want to become a writer.
Human, and characters like him, rebuilt me and have given me reason to live. They’re why I’m even still here, able to tell all of you about this book that once meant everything to me, that I burrowed inside, that planted its own seeds inside my chest to take root and bloom into trees that continue to define who I keep becoming.
When I finished the novel, shattered, unable to speak, unable to do anything but consider how I’d sneak the sequel into my room and read it while no one noticed, something new began roiling inside me.
Some might call it healing. But I began changing. Leaving fear and shame—not all of it, but enough—behind.
I snuck back to my parents’ room and put it back where my father hid it.
For I was a liar, a deceiver, an unbeliever. And I would never reveal myself to another.
Rereading this novel just a few weeks ago revealed the truth of this to me. I had never considered why it was this book that made me cry, why I kept rereading it, reliving it.
But before we meet Human, we first meet Novinha, a child wounded by loss, who becomes a mother to six children. And her family, the Ribeira family, is broken. Not in one way, but in every way. There is no trust between siblings, between parent and child. They are strangers to one another, lashing out, sometimes cruelly, at one another.
And though there is love, the deep connections of blood and family, this ruinous love only shatters them further. And I see so clearly, now, what I couldn’t possibly see then. Speaker for the Dead was able to puncture through the walls I’d built round my heart because of the way it reflected the hurt, wounded child I was. The one who needed hope, who clung desperately to unreal visions, who sought for answers forever outside himself, believing, perhaps, that an answer beyond me would turn around and heal me, fill me.
Make me whole.
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This is one of the few Substacks I look forward to reading every week. It consistently explores deep themes of religious loss and struggle, and demonstrates how books are fundamental to human meaning. So thank you for writing this piece -- once again I relate deeply.
I'm also struck by how radicalizing it is to have a book taken away from you when you are young. My parents did the same thing to me in high school, and that was a turning point in my life. I became a free thought/free speech radical at the age of 16 as a result, and I have been ever sense.
Honestly, taking that book away from me was one of the most formative things my parents could have done for me. It turned me into a book obsessive.
What can I say? It made me get the book.