A Home for More than Books
A public librarian joins Amanda Oliver in her reckoning with the institution of the library—past, present, and future.
Review by Joel Cuthbertson
If you’ve been to a public library recently, you probably fall into one of four categories: parent of young children, bookworm, desperate for a printer, or homeless. In the last thirty to forty years of booming deinstitutionalization—which has included the shuttering of mental health facilities as well as public shelters—librarians have become front-line workers for our cities’ unhoused populations. Book-loving is still the bait with which new public librarians are hooked, but a desire to further the common good—to be a servant of the polis—is more and more a requirement to enter the field, and almost certainly one that’s needed to stay in it.
Let me give you a small glimpse of a day in the life. As a public librarian in the suburbs of Denver, I have a range of responsibilities. I plan programs for teens and adults, everything from book clubs to DIY lightsaber builds. I “weed” our collection of materials and run displays, and I assist patrons with almost any question, concern, or thought they bring through the door. I’ve helped patrons recover their email passwords, patrons who want the next book in their cupcake mystery series, and one patron who pointed a finger gun at my head and wouldn’t stop accusing our circulation clerks of being “a bunch of f—ing bitches.” In his case, I also called the police. And yet, when the officers came and escorted him out, I felt like I’d betrayed him. There are few public areas with controlled temperature and free Wi-Fi that have less barriers to entry than a library. If he couldn’t keep coming to us, there were next to no safe places left for him to land.
That our libraries are centers of trauma is the focus of Amanda Oliver’s Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library. Where my branch is something like an urgent care center, her place of work in the heart of Washington, DC, more resembled a trauma-one ICU. She describes incident after incident meant to shock your average Barnes & Noble shopper. On her first day, a patron in the main part of the building begins pointing at various library workers and shouting, “I’ll kill you!” He notices Oliver when she arrives and makes sure she’s included. I’ve observed this about the dangerously unstable as well. They can be alarmingly thorough when it comes to their intentions. How considerate of the man to point, so that Oliver could be left in no doubt. I’ll kill you, specifically.
When she focuses on her former obligations as a public librarian for DC’s Northwest One branch—a branch infamous for “incidents”—Oliver writes with compelling command of the environment, gives insightful glosses of her fellow library workers, and captures the bizarre tension of what it means to be the kind of librarian who wears a key to the panic button around one’s neck. Zooming out, she also examines how homelessness became a salient library reality in the first place. She walks the reader through various policy outcomes on both a national and local level, starting with President John F. Kennedy’s signing of the Community Health Act in 1963 up to the closing of DC’s Franklin School Shelter in 2008. Time and again, she writes, changes in city planning “effectively exiled… unhoused people who had still been living” in the area. Libraries, which are free and open to all, became one of the last refuges of the unhoused.
Despite her convincing calls for moral clarity on the burdens many librarians face, Oliver ends in a space as hopeful as the most optimistic library defender.
As she considers the future of the library, and what it might offer our society going forward, Oliver is especially poignant on the habits that undergird the exchange between librarian and patron. She disdains the popular idea that libraries might save us, and gives plenty of examples from Forbes, The Atlantic, and more which naively suggest just this daydream. Instead, Oliver insists that the kind of openness and curiosity she “saw again and again at the library, particularly at the circulation desk” is a legitimate rejoinder to “the fragmentation and individualism, the scapegoating and straw-manning” that our current information environments (social media) breed so easily. It’s a truly librarian section of the book, in which she references Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and the masturbation-inspired cancellation of Louis C.K. For any of the faults of this slim volume, Oliver made a fan of me for life with that one page alone.
Still, Overdue is an awkward, and at times befuddling, formal venture. The hiccups begin with the Author’s Note, which exists like an intrusive thought committed to paper. Oliver feels it necessary to insist, for example, that she’s not trying to be a voice for the voiceless and that it “is not, and never will be, my place to tell patrons’ stories.” You’ll never guess what happens immediately after: she tells a patron’s story. Since she’s a writer and patrons are a vital aspect of the library, I’m not sure why she wouldn’t. Reporting of any kind is a transgressive act, as taught in the 101 journalism tenets of Janet Malcolm. The people whose lives you reveal, you always betray, at least a little.
This floundering of purpose trickles down throughout the book. Just one example is her inability to connect her history of Benjamin Franklin’s whites-only colonial library with the marginalized, unsettling patron who stalks her after work. The juxtaposition within the text suggests there’s a spiritual thread between these two facts, and maybe a material or cultural one as well. While both are about the “darker side of libraries,” it’s not enough to throw everything interesting against the wall and hope a pattern emerges.
At root is that Oliver can’t decide which path of disenchantment to forefront until it’s too late. Will she choose an historical one which casts the library as complicit in our country’s darker periods of racism and exclusion, a personal journey that sees her burnout as a vital step toward self-actualization, or the story of a modern misconception desperately in need of a reality check? The last path is where the book lands, and when it’s allowed to frame the other two instincts, the prose is shorn of its shagginess and hesitation.
Unfortunately, this mostly occurs in the second half of the book, such as when Oliver visits Riverside’s public library and notes the odd disjunction between its lily-white collection and a town that’s “53.7% Hispanic or Latino.” The issues surrounding libraries and marginalization are suddenly vital and concrete. Similarly, when she talks about growing up with physical encyclopediae, the story pivots to her use of reference books when she serves as a school librarian. The personal informs the argument and the argument enlarges and enriches the personal, all while the reader learns more about the nitty-gritty of librarianship. Even her political positions suddenly gain backbone. Without casting aside her left-leaning commitments on issues like abortion or Trump, she makes a convincing argument for the library as a meeting ground of good-faith searching, for the library model as a way to mitigate “the incredible pull and pleasure of binary thinking.”
Despite her convincing calls for moral clarity on the burdens many librarians face, Oliver ends in a space as hopeful as the most optimistic library defender. She has her MLS, after all, and however corrupt the reality of libraries can become, they’re founded on an idea that has attracted different cultures for literally thousands of years. With a book that’s sure to be a touchstone for librarians across the country, I only wish she could have paired this ending idealism with a practical suggestion: namely, that libraries end their credentialism racket. If public librarians are serious about diversifying their staff, integrating more fully with local communities, and expanding their ranks with those who’ve proven they can survive the library burnout, they need to tear down the gates they’ve chained shut with the MLS (and MLIS) degree. A library master’s degree serves a purpose, but that it’s a requirement for most public librarian jobs is a farce, if not a kind of fraud.
Whatever else the library is, the institution has proved itself both resilient and internally vital to community identity. Without falling prey to librarian-worship, Oliver is right that libraries will only thrive at the level of support we offer to the people inside them, staff and patrons alike.
Joel Cuthbertson is a writer from Denver. His fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, LitHub, The Millions and more.
Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library was published by Chicago Review Press on March 22, 2022. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a copy to our reviewer. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
