My birthday looms. I’d just as soon ignore it, but the other day my adult children asked me what I wanted. Pressed beyond the reflexive, “Oh, nothing,” I replied that a book would be nice. “One that would keep me up all night,” I added. They wanted an author, a title. “I don’t know,” I said, “and anyway, it’s probably too late.”

“What does that mean?” they chorused.

“I’m not sure,” I replied honestly.

Later, I wondered about the conversation. I had meant, of course, a book like William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, which I finished sometime in the literal darkness one night my junior year in college. The character of Peyton embodied all my personal angst. She railed against her mother, “One of those sad neurotics who huddle over their misery and take their mean little hatreds out on anybody they envy.” She battled the staid values of her Southern town, and sought escape in alcohol and disastrous relationships. How could I stop reading until I had accompanied Peyton through the final breathless chapters of interior monologue, where she says, “A guilt past memory or dreaming, much darker, impels me on?” How could I not see her through to the culmination of her despair? When Styron published Darkness Visible in the 1990s I saw that Peyton had been an early voice of his own battle with depression. But I couldn’t get very far into the memoir. It was too straightforward, and I was in a different place.

In the early 1960s I found myself in a first-floor apartment of a Victorian house in Cambridge. My husband was finishing his commitment to the Navy and spent every third night aboard the USS Boston. On one of those nights, with my colicky baby finally quiet, I escaped with Gone with the Wind. Sitting in my kitchen, decorated in baby food and surrounded by piles of laundry in various stages, I identified with Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled young woman who finds that the world she had been brought up for has been swept away.

Not that my baby was anything like the Civil War, but still… Against Margaret Mitchell’s backdrop of a war-shattered South, I was riveted as I watched Scarlett interact with a range of vividly drawn characters and vow to survive. In the wee hours of the morning, exhausted, I could agree with Scarlett that “Tomorrow is another day.”

My first year of teaching British literature to high school juniors rekindled my love of the Medieval period. That summer I read Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, which, I’m sure my students would have agreed, is a tad more engaging than Malory’s convoluted La Morte D’Arthur. Here is 12th-century feudal England with its forests, castles, and monasteries as settings for love, betrayal, and revenge. The first sentence had me hooked: “The small boys came early to the hanging.” I became increasingly engulfed in the intertwined lives of Follett’s deeply drawn and diverse characters and in the central fact and metaphor of the novel, the building of a cathedral.

Over the next decades, working and raising a family, I seem to have been especially drawn to books about somewhat alienated characters who explore their pasts to find an identity. Maybe they were part of a mid-life crisis. “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God.” After reading John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, I, too, am doomed to remember Owen. Filled with bizarre characters and the minutest details of their dysfunctional lives, the world that Irving creates is impossible to tear away from. It’s all so hard to believe that it is ultimately believable.

I am also doomed to remember, fortunately only vaguely, a scene from Pat Conway’s book The Prince of Tides, a novel set in the low country of South Carolina. It is an event of ruthlessness and horror, which the main character discovers in searching into his family’s dark and violent past.

Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One follows his protagonist through a childhood of prejudice in South Africa, a boxing career, and finally a leadership role that helps him redeem the past.

I have never reread any of these books. They each belong to a certain time in my life and I want them to remain as part of that past. In the last several years no book has kept me up all night reading. That bothers me because it means either that I am too old to stay up all night or that I no longer have those huge emotions that can be assuaged or augmented by spending all night with the right book. Maybe it really is too late. Still, I hope someone gives me a good book for my birthday.