Bookmarked: Reading My Way from Hollywood to Brooklyn

For context, it matters that Fairey's mother was famous Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham, the final lover of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who mentored her reading and who died in her house. As Fairey explains in this literary bildungsroman, her life as a reader began with the classic novels which Fitzgerald bought her mother and which she grew up with on the family's bookshelves. Fairey has told the story before (One of the Family), but here she achieves a satisfying intertwining of Graham's life with her own: the personal (boarding school, graduate school, marriage) and professional (as college administrator and teacher.) She matches each stage of her life to a different literary character, mostly from 19th century and early 20th century British novels, including David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Portrait of a Lady, Howards End, To the Lighthouse, and A Passage to India. As the book closes, she finds herself on a "steep learning curve," discovering a new world of Indian writers in preparation for a trip to that country. Bookish folk will relish her conviction that literature speaks directly to personal experience; readers who share her special interests will find themselves engaged, even in disagreement, with her critical analyses. Memoirs of Hollywood, and of children's recollections of the famous, abound, but this very bookish one, uniquely, is rereadable. (Mar.)