Sometimes, Life Leads You Back

They are all the rage these days--featured on “Oprah,” sponsored by bookstores, promoted online, touted by public libraries.

Book clubs, in their various permutations, have become the intellectual element of a well-rounded life today. Part salon, part social club, they range from informal free-for-alls to literary pressure cookers.

Our group had rather humble beginnings, launched more than 20 years ago by a handful of suburban mothers, bright women dulled by monotony. In their day, smart women snagged successful men in college and then settled down to a life of cookie-baking, carpooling, PTA . . . and occasional get-togethers to keep up on current events.

That evolved into a reading circle, and the Thursday Book Group was born.

“We used to meet during the day when our kids were in school,” my friend Robin recalls. “Then our kids got older and some of us started our own careers, so we had to start meeting at night.”

Rita recalls feeling “desperate” for an intellectual outlet--”anything that didn’t involve kids”--when Robin met her at synagogue and invited her to join. Rita had four kids, ranging from 2 to 10, “and the book group was the only thing I’d done for myself since my kids were born.”

I joined the group in the early ‘80s, invited by two bookstore owners I’d met while researching a newspaper article on bookstores catering to women. I was new in town, with no friends to speak of, living in a sprawling, suburban apartment complex full of Hollywood wannabes. I jumped at the chance to mingle with women who had something more on their minds than their tennis games.

I expected my entre to be awkward, though. These were white women, suburban moms, middle-class, approaching middle age. I was black, newly married and childless, in my mid-20s with a precious journalism career.

“What could you possibly have in common?” my bewildered husband used to wonder as I’d dash off from dinner to the meetings we held each month at a member’s home.

What we shared was a passion for books, a tendency toward introspection, a thriving curiosity. . . . But those were just the lures that hooked me.

While I loved the books and our discussions, what kept me coming through the years was as much personal as literary.

Our book selections were eclectic, from Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” to D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love.” We read John Cheever, Gloria Naylor, Ayn Rand, William Least Heat Moon. . . . And as the reading expanded my mental horizons, the group’s human dynamics altered my emotional terrain as well.

I was intrigued by the lives of these women, by our differences and our similarities. They were ahead of me on the road through life . . . facing divorce while I still stroked romantic love, struggling with wayward teenagers when I was barely out of my teens, contemplating hysterectomies while I considered having kids, leaning on friendships that had begun before I was born.

I didn’t realize it then; I see it only now looking back. But they were to be my escorts, of sorts, through passages--some painful, some exhilarating--that would be hard to face alone.

From them I learned that good marriages can turn rocky and bad ones can endure. That divorce is survivable, and new love can bloom even in the dark. That all children eventually are potty trained. That the sweetest toddler can turn into the teen from hell.

I gained strength as I watched women climb from the wreckage of carefully planned lives suddenly derailed. And when the pillars of my own life toppled, I had a safe place to share my pain.

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It had been almost a decade since I attended my last book group meeting, 10 years since reading had been rendered an unaffordable luxury by the ceaseless needs of two small children and a baby on the way.

But when I walked into Rita’s living room last week and found the group deep in discussion of Nadine Gordimer’s collection “Jump and Other Stories,” it felt like I had never been away. There were new faces, but enough of the familiar ones--Robin, Dorothy, Judy--to let me know I was home.

They are still ahead of me, of course. That difficult child is now a college honor student. That headstrong teenager has produced delightful grandchildren. The bitter divorce has given way to years of marital bliss.

And it strikes me as I meet the newcomers that they are where I used to be, with their new babies and fledgling careers. And I have moved into the lives that my old friends used to lead.

I think it’s time to take up reading again, even if only for the renewed camaraderie. I need to refuel my tanks, I think; the journey is yet long, and these women are the guides I still need.

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.