What books did you need?

Just one more of the post-Paris ideas to discuss, and this should be a short one. We're in the home stretch! [Yes, in the real world it is still late in the evening of December 28, 2023.]

After we'd spent a long time over dinner on Day 12, wringing and worrying the topic of "privilege," Marie abruptly asked me, "What books were really important to you when you were a kid? What books did you need to read?"

Was this a non-sequitur? 

Turns out that no, it was not. For her, the critical book when she was very young was called What Suzy Wants.* The book tells the story of a little girl named Suzy, who will be having a birthday soon. All her family members talk about what they are going to get her for her birthday, but mostly each one of them plans to get her the kind of present that he (or she) would enjoy. Only Suzy's father actually asks Suzy what she wants; and therefore only Suzy's father gets her what she really wants. (I think Marie said it was a puppy.)

The applicability to her own life was that Marie was part of a large family, and she felt like no one ever asked her what she wanted. She felt like people treated her as they would have wanted to be treated (which is one reading of the Golden Rule, I suppose) even when her own preferences were very different. I don't remember whether her father was an exception to this general rule of Not Seeing Her, but in any event her father committed suicide early in Marie's adolescence. So for many years he wasn't around.

When it was my turn, I went with the very first answer that popped into my head: Robert Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky. There was a period of a few years when I read most of Heinlein's juvenile fiction (and actually I think so did Marie!) so why that one? But that's easy. The protagonist is socially clueless, and chronically misunderstood**. My kind of guy. Open and shut.

Maybe I should say more about this, but I'm really not sure what more has to be said.   

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* I can't find this book through either Google or Amazon. I'm sure it existed once upon a time, but it appears to have sunk like a stone. 

** Especially by his father.