The Healing Quality of Literature

Books Can Heal

… I wrote about life, about survival after the death of a loved one, about the power of books that can heal everything - absolutely everything. - Nina George

Books are Magic. This Brooklyn bookstore had the right idea when they picked their name.

In this blog space I wasn’t planning to talk about fiction novels (though I love to read), but this week I read a novel, The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George and it made me realize that I should definitely talk about fiction when thinking about happiness, wholeness and healing. The Little Paris Bookshop. was charming and heart-warming, but at it's core, it was a love letter to literature and its curative properties.

Jean Perdu is the main character of the novel. He is a bookshop owner but his store is not quite ordinary. Instead, it is a book barge that floats on the Seine River in Paris. Can it get anymore adorable? Perdu sees himself not as a shop owner but, instead as a sort of literary apothecary. He has the uncanny knack of matching his customers with the perfect book. He can see into their soul, understand struggling and strife and pick out exactly the story they need to bring them back to life.

There is more to the book; it is a story of love, grief and travel, but, as a therapist and a lover of literature, Perdu’s view of books as medicine, is what stuck with me most. Since I was a child, there are countless times I have become awakened, felt connected, learned something about myself or have been consoled by a novel. There are some books that illustrate exactly the lesson you need to learn at a time you didn’t even know you needed it. Others enlighten you about the world beyond yourself and your experiences, allowing you to put yourself in the shoes of others, empathize, start to see yourself differently and leave you with a desire to learn more things.

I think that for whatever you are dealing with, there is a novel that can speak to it. In the back of Little Paris Bookshop, George adds a list of novels in Perdu’s Literary Pharmacy and you can see some pictures below. This may be a good starting point if you are looking for a novel to cure. If you have any titles you would like to add to the pharmacy, comment below!