Librarians change your life. Libraries change the world.

My mother was a librarian. Lots of folks don’t know that librarians, who run their staffs, invent programming and lead their local branch libraries often specialize in particular disciplines and become experts in their field of study. My mom, Ida Bonicelli, graduated from Saint Catherine’s in St. Paul, Minnesota along with her twin sister, Irma with degrees in library science. My mom could read and write Italian and German in addition to her native English, which placed her in the arts. Irma was into science. They would have fabulous careers as librarians (with Irma eventually marrying and becoming a librarian at Washington University in Saint Louis where her husband became a circuit court judge). They were the daughters of Carlo and Lucia Bonicelli, Italian immigrants from the Lombardy region of Italy. They also had a son (which could be spelled sun), Orlando, who was the eldest and was awarded a full ride scholarship to the University of Notre Dame to play basketball. Orlando was a star, and my mom worshiped him.

This was the 1940’s, and you know how this story goes from your own families. My uncle was playing basketball at Notre Dame and was drafted into the Navy during his sophomore year in college. He served honorably in the Pacific Theater while his sisters and mother worried and prayed for his safe return from the war. My grandfather Carlo had served during World War I in France for the United States and developed a cancer from being bombed with mustard gas as a young soldier. He was told when he was honorably discharged that he would not live to see his 40th birthday. He died when he was 39 years old. Orlando was 11 and the twins were 8 years old when their father passed on. My uncle Orlando could have avoided serving in World War II because he was the only male in the household and his own father had given his life for our country. But, my grandmother said, “My son will serve like everyone else.” Immigrants choose to be American, and they give all they’ve got to the country they love.

They were typical American immigrants just like your family- no matter your country of origin. Immigrants worked hard, stayed close, had deep faith and dealt with whatever came their way. They were good citizens—they participated in government and voted. They supported their neighbors and local businesses. They were proud to be American. Immigrant is a word of honor in our home today and always.

I can’t really tell the story of my mom without sharing all of this with you because, more than anything, my mom was shaped by her family. The ship’s manifest of my grandmother’s passage with her father in 1913 tells me that my grandmother and great grandfather could read and write when they came to America. Reading. Writing. Education. They were poor, but they knew what was priceless…an education. Books. Knowledge. Conversation. Ideas.

My mom and her siblings were born in Chisholm on the Iron Range of Minnesota. My grandfather owned and operated The Progressive Shoe Shop at 5 West Lake Street. The business of shoe repair was downstairs on the street level. In the back, my grandmother sewed all manner of clothing: coats, wedding gowns, suits. For extra income she took in alterations from the local department store. She became the sole breadwinner when her husband died—she was 35 years old. She lived to 92 and never remarried.

My grandmother Lucia was an avid reader. I recently returned to Chisholm with my Bonicelli cousins. We went to the public library, a place I loved as a child. Looking back, I realize that the public library was the first place we went, no matter where we were. Libraries were presented to me as a treasure, a wonderland of ideas- a place that was fun, but required a certain reverence. I don’t know if it was fate, but that particular day, the Chisholm librarians had big, doorstopper novels in Italian, and others translated to the English on display at the main desk. I imagined that my grandmother must have read them all. I remember my mom telling me that her mother always had a book to read nearby her sewing machine in the shop. I opened every book and imagined my grandmother turning the pages. She was also a bit of a medical person—she had a book where she looked up how to treat various ailments and diseases, and her friends called her Doctor Bonicelli. Lucia, look this up in your book! They’d joke.

When Ida and Irma graduated from college, Orlando, who was older than the girls, went to the priests at Notre Dame and explained that his sisters needed jobs. So, the twins wrote their letters, and soon they arrived in South Bend, Indiana, where they would share an apartment and work in the library system at the university. Father Ted Hesburgh, the president of the university called them “the heavenly twins”, but my mom would tell you that they were the only women on campus which made them heavenly by default. Make no mistake, my mom was beautiful, but she was one of those women who didn’t know it. She had sprezzatura, her beauty was effortless, lipstick and moisturizer. I wish I had inherited that regimen from her! It takes an act of Congress over here for me to prepare to leave the house.

Notre Dame. My mom, under her mentor, Frank Montana, the head of the Architecture Department, created the first Architecture Library at the university. She remembered her first day: a dusty closet stuffed with books that were in terrible shape. She transformed it into a magnificent library with new books, sculptures, paintings, work tables and displays. When Mom died in 2017, we received a letter from Notre Dame that said without our mom’s library, the Architecture Department would not have been accredited. This was a monumental contribution, but somehow, she hadn’t told us the scope of her accomplishments. Ida was creative, smart and a visionary in her own right, bringing the art of architecture to life. And then, my mom met my dad. They fell in love and got married at Notre Dame and proceeded to build a family of seven children. But I always knew that she was a librarian before she was a mother, and her work had a profound effect on me.

I knew to be a librarian was to be someone very special. It was to be an educator, a teacher, someone who inspires. Years later when I was blessed to go on my first book tour, my mom looked at the list and said, Where are the libraries? I went back to Random House and said, My mom says we need to go to libraries. Todd Doughty, my publicist at the time said, Great. He made it happen. My mom was pleased. Ever since, half of my tour stops are libraries, maybe more. To this day, whenever I visit a library, I think of my mother.

It was the mandate back then, for a woman to give up her career in order to raise a family. But Mom never gave up the library. Through her, I became obsessed with books and reading, and I refer to her, and quote her—almost daily. She said, “You are always better for having read a book.” She said, “For any problem you have in life, you can find the solution in the library.” She said, “Every mother should be educated, because the mother teaches her children.”

When I became enamored of Heidi by Johanna Spyri around my 8th birthday, my mom took the opportunity to tell me about her mother and father, from the Lombardy region in the Italian Alps. I read that book over and over again, searching for clues about who we were, thinking all the Alps were the same, wondering why my grandparents would leave a place so beautiful to come to America.

My mom told me a story later in life about Heidi. She and her sister attended a summer program every year at the Chisholm Library. The librarian there held a contest. The winner who read the most books that summer would receive a prize. In my mom’s 9th summer (a year after her father died), she read the most books. The prize? A copy of Heidi. Mom also told me why she and Irma became librarians. The librarian taught them how to bind books—how to repair them. My mom could’ve bound a book for you until the end of her life. She explained the process of “sewing” the pages together: the glue, the ink, the pages. She learned then that a book is a sacred object and must be cared for, repaired and put back in circulation. Someone will benefit from reading this book, she knew.

Ida and Irma were thrilled to go to Saint Catherine’s. Please know girls weren’t automatically sent to college back then (and if you want to get me started, there’s a common complaint out there by a few men that less boys than girls are going to college now—that the boys have been left behind. I want our boys and our girls to thrive- and one shouldn’t succeed at the expense of the other. It took generations of girls seeking higher education to get our girls where they are today- and it wasn’t easy or expected- ask your grandmother! Ida and Irma did work study, and like all young women of their time, they had big dreams. The war had created a kind of leadership runway for American girls. They had a role when the men went off to war. (My great Aunt Helen served in World War II- there were WACS and WAVES and nurses, but the men had us outnumbered in the service. Women served essential roles at home. They were keeping the country going, and that meant everything in the community, from the factories, to the restaurants, to the schools and the public library.

When I returned to the library in Chisholm last year, I felt my mom there. I went down to the children’s room, where I had spent time as a girl. Going to the library as a child was a treat. I couldn’t wait to get there and go through the stacks and choose books to read. I began my love of Nancy Drew there, but read Laura Ingalls Wilder and Cherry Ames, Student Nurse (it was already an old chestnut in the 1970’s, but I didn’t care!). Cherry turned me off to a life in the medical profession, but Nancy Drew made me want to solve crimes and ride around in a roadster with a cute guy named Ned.

I found it hard to leave the library in Chisholm on my last visit. I realized that the only place in the world that hadn’t changed since I was 10 was the Chisholm Public Library. That also holds true for the C Bascom Slemp Memorial Library in Big Stone Gap. For the Wise County Book Mobile. For the Powell Valley High School Library (now renamed Union High). For the Big Stone Gap Elementary School Library. Libraries are classics, and the stacks, it seems, are eternal.

I remember my librarians as clearly as the books I read. Mrs. Ernestine Roller was so kind, she was adorable and wore bright red lipstick. I remember Miss Billie Jean Scott who was slim with jet black hair. She wore a lightweight sweater clipped around her neck with a gold chain and two small jeweled birds as clasps. She was so hip. She allowed me to spend time in the magazine room where she had methodically kept every Time, Newsweek and Look magazine since the 1940’s. This served my passion for historical research ever since. Our county bookmobile librarian, Mr. James Varner, was hilarious. He had a thermos of coffee in the window. The bookmobile had the scent of hot coffee, tobacco and books. Sometimes it had the scent of Emeraude or whatever perfume the last lady who checked out a book was wearing. My mom taught us to respect these folks and hold them in the highest esteem. I did and do.

Last weekend, I was at BookCon on a panel with Jodi Picoult, Isabel Ibañez and Rebecca Lehmann, with Jason Blitman as the moderator. Jodi Picoult, a warrior against book banning and a beloved and brilliant author, spoke on the panel. Jodi’s war against book banning made me think of my mom, and a time when I was a girl and got into trouble for reading a book.

I was a world class babysitter in Big Stone Gap. You could also say that I was a bit of a pimp. I would farm my sisters out on gigs I couldn’t do, keeping the business (in my mind I was a mogul) afloat. My sisters would tell you that it wasn’t true—I took the best paying gigs and left the scraps for them. Let’s just agree to disagree on that. Anyhow, there was a book at the library on the main table, it had a cover that intrigued me, so I checked it out of the Slemp Library. I was so engrossed in this book, that I began to read it aloud in 8th grade Study Hall. It was called Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber. It’s the story of a woman with multiple personalities. There had been a TV movie made about it starring Sally Field.

I came home from school, and my mom asked me what I was reading. My heart sank. I knew what was coming, or thought I did. “Someone called and said you were reading an inappropriate book,” she said. I was immediately defensive. My mom was cool as a cucumber. “Let me look at it.” she said. All I wanted to do was keep reading the book.

The next day, my mom handed the book back to me. Please know my mom was elegant, kind and artistic. She had a deep faith and played by the rules. I thought she was so beautiful that I didn’t deserve to be her daughter. She was not like me, but I so wanted to be like her. I could make her laugh, and that was my best and only skill. But I had nothing funny to say that morning. I felt betrayed—whoever this mystery rat was who outed my library check-outs really annoyed me. I didn’t even want to know who it was, I just wanted to finish the book and continue forth with my dramatic readings in Study Hall.

“Can I read it?” I asked her. My mom handed the book back to me and said, “Don’t ever let anyone tell you what you should read or shouldn’t read. Read everything.” Later my mom looked back on that moment and told me that the development of a keen intellect came from reading a variety of books and asking questions.

I’ve had some wonderful moments in my life, but nothing brought me the validation, reinforcement and strength of purpose more than my mother had that day. Every time some idiot carps about banning books, I think of her. My mom believed in the sacred trust that is formed between a reader and a book. As readers, we enter a world, made possible by a writer who was desperate to share that world with us. Their ideas can inspire us, steer our thinking, or challenge our beliefs. My mother understood this, and she wanted me to understand that I was free. Free to read. Free to learn. Free to explore ideas. Free to share those ideas with those around me. Free to check out books at the free Public Library! Free to think my own thoughts and form my own opinions. Free to become whatever it was I would become. There’s a direct line from my mother’s wisdom to this moment. She believed the written word was sacred—that a book can change a life. Somehow, she knew books would change mine. And yours.