By Lauren Willig
July 17th, 2008

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Oh, the bittersweet memories. The sweet nothings, the cuddling in corners, that endearing bit of broken binding. Somewhere out there lives the book of your memories, a book you once loved but that escaped your grasp and now exists only in memory as… the Book That Got Away.

I went through scads of books in my youth, many of them with interchangeable titles. You remember some; you forget others. But every now and then, you encounter a book that lingers in your imagination—except for the title. And the author’s name. Little details like that. You may be able to recount the plot point by point, you may be able to describe the cover down to the last bulging thew, but neither of those are searchable on Amazon.

My very own Book That Got Away dates back to seventh grade. Picture it: 1989. Hair is fluffy, stirrup leggings are in, and my best friend has been raiding her big sister’s bookshelf again. Under cover of our desks, she passes the latest over to me while our Latin teacher is singing the lunch menu in the manner of a tenor at the Met (no, seriously, he did that—he also sang out our names when he called on us. I was always “Laur-laur-laur-laur-laur…laur-laur-laur-laur-laur… LAUR!” But I digress.) He’s still on the entrée, so I check out the back. A handicapped American spinster… an Austrian count… a marriage of convenience and assorted Eastern European revolutions. Brilliant! I wasn’t so keen on Eastern European revolutions, which generally ended in burning castles and emigrations, but I adored marriage of convenience plots and Austrian noblemen (in my head, they all looked a lot like Christopher Plummer). I dropped my prize into my Chocolate Soup messenger bag, nudging it occasionally with my toe so I could check out the cover and gloat. The hero, Nancy assured me as we made our way to English class, was exceptionally dashing, very Judith McNaught. I gave a little bounce up and down in token of my anticipation and wondered, a trifle uneasily, why the contents of my stomach seemed to keep on bouncing even after I had stopped.

And that’s when I threw up right across the threshold of the seventh grade English classroom.

I gather they didn’t have English class in that room that day. I couldn’t vouch for that, since I wasn’t there. I was at home, in bed, hiding from my seventh grade shame in a pre-World War I world of hunting lodges, heiresses, and tormented heroes with mysterious first marriages. Queasy but contented, I lay propped against my pillows, imagining myself in a bustled gown, whisking across the garden of an Austrian estate, while a golden-haired count hurried in my wake. Woozy with flu, I finished the entire book in one go and fell into a medicated sleep peopled with limping Austrian noblemen who summoned me across the waters for marriages of convenience.

Both I and the book went back to school the next day, and the book, no worse for wear (although the same couldn’t be said for the carpet in the English classroom) went back to Nancy’s sister. And that was that. Until years later when the memories of the book that got away nagged at me and nagged at me until I had to track it down. Fortunately, I remembered that the heroine’s name was Eliza and that the title had “Night” in the cover. An afternoon of concerted googling finally revealed my Book That Got Away as Surrender the Night by Christine Monson. Within the hour a used copy was wending its way Cambridge-wards. And we all lived happily ever after.

Do you have a Book That Got Away?

[N.B. For anyone pining after a hard-to-track-down book, Smart Bitches Trashy Books has a marvelous feature where you can write in a description of a plot and they'll post it for the readership to identify. Huzzah for SBTB!]

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