Finding Life Between The Lines

 

All my life, I have been in love with books. Whether traveling across town or across continents, I must have books with me. I have been drawn into the worlds that Jodi Picoult creates for decades. I included her book, A Spark of Light, in my Ms. Magazine article, “Feminist Fiction Books to Curl Up with for the Holidays.”

I was thrilled to learn that the book she wrote with her daughter, Samantha van Leer, called Between the Lines was set to become a Broadway Musical. However, that was before COVID-19 and the closing of many openings. While we are all #SafeAtHome, there are no new musicals right now. I hope that it will happen in the future.

While we are #TogetherAtHome, I wanted to share some of my favorite lines from their book, Off the Page:

“Going to high school is a little like being told you have to get up each morning and run headlong at sixty miles an hour into the same brick wall.”

“Everyone has a story. You might think it’s not worth telling, but then again, it’s a story no one has ever heard.”

“What you do, what you say, how you carry the plot, just might leave a mark on someone.”

“Because that’s what stories do. They help you escape, and they give you the chance to do things you never imagined you would or could. They let you feel heartbreak you’ve never had and experience adventures from the safety of your own room. They are dreams for those who are still awake. They can be as comfortable as an old pair of slippers and as unnerving as the blade of a knife. They possess the power to change you, to inspire you, to open your mind.”

“Stories are all around us, caught in the throats of the strangers you walk past and scrawled on the pages of locked diaries. They’re in love letters that were never sent and between the lines of every conversation ever spoken. Just because your story’s not written down doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Perhaps someone’s reading your story right now, in fact—imagining your eyes skimming over this page, your hands clutching the binding as you hurry to get to the last line.”

And from Between the Lines, “The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.”

“So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she’s stopped believing the impossible can happen?”

I am looking forward to Jodi Picoult’s next book, The Book of Two Ways, due out on September 22, 2020.

All flower photos by Lisa Niver with #LGV60ThinQ during COVID-19 walks around the block.

Read more about Between the Lines in my new Ms. Magazine article: 8 Books That Will Transport You

Lisa Ellen Niver

Lisa Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries on six continents. This University of Pennsylvania graduate sailed across the seas for seven years with Princess Cruises, Royal Caribbean, and Renaissance Cruises and spent three years backpacking across Asia. Discover her articles in publications from AARP: The Magazine and AAA Explorer to WIRED and Wharton Magazine, as well as her site WeSaidGoTravel. On her award nominated global podcast, Make Your Own Map, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors, and as a journalist has been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. For her print and digital stories as well as her television segments, she has been awarded three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and been a finalist twenty-two times. Named a #3 travel influencer for 2023, Niver talks travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, her YouTube channel with over 2 million views, and in her memoir, Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty.

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