My History of Highlighting: Following the Fluorescent Yellow Path to the Heart of Reading… and Writing

Highlighting text in bright yellow has been a habit of mine for as long as I can remember. When I tried to think back to when I first started, I came up empty.?So I did a little digging and found out that the highlighter was invented in 1962 by a guy named Frank Honn from West Caldwell, New Jersey, as a better alternative to the squiggly underlining produced by a pencil or pen. I figure I started using one in high school or college, to make key information from textbooks that might be on tests stand out.

That turned into highlighting newspaper clips I’d use as a background for stories when I began working in journalism. And eventually, I’d keep a trusty highlighter along with the bookmark in whatever novel or work of nonfiction I was reading.

When people asked why I’d cite three reasons: One, to identify key plot transitions to mark my way if I ever wanted to return to the book and skim it from start to finish; Two, to take note of thoughts or observations from the author that mirrored and magnified things that I myself had thought about but maybe never expressed; and Three, to put a halo over sentences so beautifully or memorably written that I never wanted to lose them. Here are some examples of each application.

Signposts Marking the Story’s Path

I need help following storylines when a book is long with lots of meandering plotlines and transitions, or when I’m in one of those periods when there are time gaps between my reading and I’m hazy about what I’ve already read. Without the kind of “Previously on ….” recaps that TV series provide, I have to rely on highlighter signposts to mark key plot points or shifts in the story trajectory to refresh my memory.

“Luster,” a debut novel by Raven Leilani that got rave reviews when it came out in the summer of 2020, is only 227 pages long, but I was working on multiple projects when I read it, and sometimes had to leave it unopened for days. Highlighting helped me retrace my steps alongside the heroine, a 20-something Black woman named Edie who works in a low-level publishing job in Manhattan but longs to be a painter. The story begins with her breathless affair with her older white boss, Eric, and then fills in key parts of her backstory, including the romance between Edie’s African-American “southern belle” grandmother and her irresistible West Indian grandfather. As the circuitous path unfolds, I as the reader come to know an underconfident young artist who ultimately finds herself and her talent amid the most unlikely and unusual of circumstances.

The lines I highlighted helped me navigate the route.?For example, this passage on page 4 helps me get my bearings on the dynamics dictating Edie’s complicated relationship with her older lover:

“Of course, the context of my childhood — the boy bands, the Lunchables,

the impeachment of Bill Clinton — only emphasizes our generational gap.

Eric is sensitive about his age and about mine, and he makes considerable

the effort to manage the twenty-three-year discrepancy.”

On page 32, Eric introduces Edie to the “rules” — literally — that circumscribe his open relationship with his wife, Rebecca, the plot twist that opens the door to what becomes a highly heterodox relationship and not just a routine extramarital affair. I highlighted this:

“ So the rules,’ he says, looking down at the paper. I steal a look, slide it out from

under his hand, and this is the first time I make contact with his wife.”

Later on I highlighted passages that further mark the story’s path: Edie gets fired from her job and takes the only work she can get, as a bike delivery girl; she meets and becomes a source of comfort and identity reinforcement to Eric and Rebecca’s 12-year-old adopted Black daughter, Akila; Edie and Rebecca develop an unusual bond; Edie divulges her mother’s suicide; then, after all the confusion, struggle and pain, something is released in her that manifests itself in art and she winds up where she was meant to be.

Just skimming through my highlighted notes, as I just did for this piece, gave me a deeper appreciation for Leilani’s novel and helped me to understand it more clearly than I did on first reading. I need to do this more often.

Page-Marking Eternal Themes

On page 214 of Claudia Roth Pierpont’s excellent critical evaluation of the work of Philip Roth is this sentence that instantly drew the highlighter in my hand to the text:

“The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy — that is everyman’s tragedy.”

It’s a line from Roth’s 1997 novel, American Pastoral, referring to the book’s protagonist, Seymour “Swede” Levov, a successful businessman whose teenage daughter tragically destroys the model American dream- life he’d built when she explodes a deadly bomb to protest the Vietnam War. Of Levov, Roth writes:

“Here is someone not set up for life turning out poorly, let alone for the impossible,” Roth wrote. “But who is?”

Indeed. Who is prepared for life’s tragedies? If you’ve suffered the suicide of a loved one, lost someone dear to you in a fatal accident, a drug overdose or an illness that struck out of nowhere, you know the devastation of life’s nightmarish catastrophes — the ones that form a bottomless chasm delineating before and after periods in your life.

That very theme has been the subject of a lot of my writing — a lot of people’s writing. Yet I never thought about it exactly like that or had it come out as powerfully as Roth did when his hands worked the keyboard of his Olivetti Underwood, or his computer, or his pen or pencil since he’s known to have composed in longhand, too.

Preserving Precious Words in Amber

After two years of a global pandemic whose recent decline we could not even exhale from before the Russian bombs started demolishing people’s homes in Ukraine, beautiful words offer some of the only solace available to humanity. More than ever, it’s natural to want to savor and save them.

My favorite book of the last 20 years is “Last Night in Twisted River,” a novel by John Irving that was published in 2009.

I read that it took Irving 20 years to conceive and write the book, which made me feel a little less bad about the slow progress of my first book (stay tuned). For me, “Twisted River” was well worth the wait.

The story, which spans five decades, is about a boy and his father who live in a logging community in northern New Hampshire in the 1950s and have to go on the lamb after the boy accidentally kills his dad’s lover, who happens to be the girlfriend of the vicious and vindictive local sheriff. In the course of the book’s 554 pages, the son becomes a writer.

Another novel with veins of sudden, life-changing tragedy running through it, “Twisted River” is rich with two of my favorite subjects: pretty girls, and the writing process and life.

Here’s a part I highlighted describing a girl named Meg, that the son, Danny, had met:

“She was pretty and petite, almost elfin… (a girl) that he’d first met in

a life-drawing class, where she’d been a model.

“‘One look at the girl doesn’t suffice — isn’t nearly enough.’”

“It wasn’t just because she was an exhibitionist, though Meg

clearly was that … you simply had to look at Meg, and it was almost

painful not to keep looking.”

And here’s a passage describing the scene outside the window of Danny’s writing place:

“From his new writing shack, Danny could see a pine tree that had been

shaped by the wind; it was bent at almost a right angle to itself. When

new snow was falling, and there were near whiteout conditions — so that

where the rocks on the shore ended and the frozen bay began were all?one?—

it struck Danny that the little tree had a simultaneously tenacious and

the precarious grip on its own survival.”

I kind of feel that way myself sometimes, but never put it quite so beautifully. God knows I’ve tried and will keep on trying until I get as close as I can.

In the meantime, I’ll keep on reading and highlighting, trying to soak up the art of storytelling and the magical sounds and rhythms of words composed like haunting melodies.

Recently, I’ve experimented with digital highlighting in my new Kindle Paperwhite e-reader. It not only lets me highlight with my fingertip but also saves everything I’ve highlighted in a nice, neat, backlit screen that tells me the chapter and page number of every passage and even allows me to add notations.

What’ll they think of next? I only hope I get?my?book out before someone invents the next-generation form of highlighting. And that readers anoint a few of?my?sentences with whichever form they choose.?Be on the lookout for “What Was I Thinking? Reflections on Life’s Tragedies, Turning Points and Transitions,” due out this year.