When characters become family

In the space of the last seven days I have read many books. Quite the lavish pastime to be considered "work", I know. I've gone from reading Bettina Arndt's intimate book The Sex Diaries, that has left me wanting to call my girlfriends over for a bottle of wine and a good chat, to Arndt's friend Kate Legge's The Marriage Club that has me terrified at the prospect that there is SO much that goes on behind the closed doors of other people's relationships that you can never be sure you know people at all. I find myself angry at George and frustrated at Leith - experiencing the tightness in my chest and awkward feeling in my stomach as if these people were really in my life, and not just constructed out of words on a page.
Then I dived into Anne Summers' The Lost Mother and found myself wanting to sit Anne and her mother Tuni down for a cup of tea and sympathy. This is then melded into Kirsten Reed's The Ice Age, where the adolescent in me is awakened by the awkward interactions by the vending machine and the infatuation with Gunther. When's Gunther going to pull up outside MY front door, cigarette slouching, to beckon to the open road? Craig Silvey's Jasper Jones has taken the cake though. I burst into tears when little Eliza bares her fourteen year old soul to Charlie Bucktin. Who wouldn't? The perfect gentlement, a mini Atticus Finch in the making, is that young man, despite hoarding his secret. And Jeffrey Lu - what a hysterical character, so vivid it was as if Silvey had produced a film instead of a novel.

I forget that the characters aren't real. I feel as if they were my family, or people that I know well. Their actions affect me physically and emotionally and I want to dive into the pages and be involved in their lives. Or, phone up the author and demand an alternative ending, more information, further clarification.

It's the sign of brilliant writing when your mind forgets where it is. When you forget that these people aren't really your friends, your family, your neighbours (thankfully, or not).