The Summer We Read Gatsby Read Free

cautious, she would tell me.
    “Maybe it’s just a theme,” I went on. “You know, white dresses, green lawns, finger bowls of champagne that change the scene before your eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.” I was paraphrasing from the novel because that was the sort of annoying thing I did when I was nervous, but she didn’t seem to notice. “ Gatsby is that kind of book.”
    To this she sputtered, “Don’t tell me what kind of book it is. You hadn’t even read The Great Gatsby until I gave it to you.”
    This was true. I was twenty-one that summer I read Gatsby for the first time. It was 2001, and I’d arrived to spend what would then be my third summer at Aunt Lydia’s house with the older half sister who intimidated me. Twenty-one is late to encounter the story of James Gatz and his love for the elusive Daisy, but I’d spent a peripatetic childhood in Europe, and this classic American novel had not been on the curriculum at any of the schools my mother had found for me.
    I would have missed many of the American classics had it not been for my aunt Lydia, an English teacher at an all-boys academy, Saint Something’s, in Manhattan. Lydia was the first person to encourage me to write. “Start early,” she’d advised. “Get a first novel under your belt now.” I was nine years old, spending my first summer with her in Southampton. After that, every year she would send the summer reading list she always gave her class, and a box of books. Occasionally she visited and brought the books and the list in person. I got used to cataloguing my summers according to the books she gave me. There was the Summer We Read Nancy Drew , the Summer We Read The Catcher in the Rye , the Summer We Read Edith Wharton, and the Summer We Read Catch-22 .
    The summer of 2001 became the Summer We Read Gatsby . My aunt had assumed I’d already read it, and because she taught the book during the school year, it didn’t appear on the reading lists she gave her class. It was Peck who gave me the book. That summer, she introduced me to many things besides F. Scott Fitzgerald: the dressing drink, a topspin forehand, thong underwear, proper smoke-ring technique, and Woody Allen. Her introduction to Woody Allen took the form of Annie Hall and Manhattan , not literally Mr. Allen, but it was powerful all the same.
    Peck was twenty-five then, already plump and gravel-voiced, theatrically and obsessively recovering from what she called “the denouement of the greatest love story ever told.” Her recovery took the form of chain-smoking, devouring cupcakes, and mooning about pretending to read the copy of The Great Gatsby that Miles Noble had given her when they first met. “I’m obsessed ,” she would tell me, waving her paperback. “I’m absolutely mad for this book. You know, a literary fetish is the new black.”
    Miles had read everything Fitzgerald ever wrote, he told her. “Like the Dylan song,” I said when she repeated this detail, telling the story of how they met. She didn’t get the reference. “Bob Dylan?” she’d muttered irritably. “What’s he got to do with the price of tea in China?”
    Her first words to me that summer of 2001 were “I hate you,” but she’d delivered them in a cheerful enough manner, which was confusing to the pale and fragile student I was then, still grieving my mother’s death, overwhelmed at the random nature of life’s ironies. She’d just finished at NYU—she hadn’t graduated, she’d simply finished —and was planning to become famous, and she held the page of her book with one finger and gazed at me with curiosity. “Just kidding,” she said a few seconds later. “It’s just that you’re so freaking skinny. And you look just like Daddy.”
    Daddy? He’d been dead for eighteen years. But I did resemble our father, or at least the few photos of him I’d seen. I had his dark wavy hair and brown eyes and I was angular, like him, while Peck took after