Misanthrope's Corner.(personal account: a life of avid reading, brought on by childhood experiences)(Brief Article)

Boy, did I strike a nerve with my "Igno" column. The letters poured in, and every one was positive. Not only did you outdo yourselves in your impassioned support, but some of the hair-raising examples you cited from your own contact with the breed were better than mine.

The letters were also notable for a corollary subject that kept popping up. Many of you asked what caused me to become such a voracious reader. I'm often asked this, so I might as well answer it here and now, but if it isn't the inspirational story you expected, don't say I didn't warn you.

There was nothing unusual about my childhood reading: Nancy Drew, Lassie Come Home, My Friend Flicka. Nor was there anything unusual about my pubertal reading: GWTW, Forever Amber, Anya Seton, Frank Yerby.

It wasn't until high school that I turned into a case study for a psychiatric conference on bibliomania. The impetus was not high school itself-I was no more miserable than anyone else and a lot happier than some-but an oppressive situation at home. Namely, my grandmother's collection of long-suffering Southern female martyrs who sat in our kitchen talking about how they worked their fingers to the bone "doing for" others without a thought for themselves.

Women in general are susceptible to the selflessness trap, but Southern women get carried away by it, seeing themselves as the plantation mistress going forth to do good on a grand scale. Whilst others sleep, she is abroad in the night, tirelessly nursing the sick and being acclaimed an angel of mercy by adoring throngs of invalids. The reality of her actual social class has nothing to do with it: In her mind's eye she's the lady of the manor and that's that.

I thought of them as the "moist women" because the glow of self- sacrifice seemed to condense on them, though in view of their broad experience with urinals it might have been something else. Most of them had bedridden relatives, usually husbands, whose problems required some form of regular, hands-on help. When I got home from school they would be knee-deep in discussions of "seepage" and "drainage," blissfully unaware of the one-upmanship that pulsated through their accounts. It was obvious that the woman who merely had to empty her husband's urinal felt inferior to the woman who had to change her husband's pads, who in turn felt inferior to the champ who catheterized her father-in-law four times a day.

I recoiled from them with every fiber of my budding womanhood but I didn't know why until the day one of them turned to me with a mournful smile and said, "A bright girl like you should go to nursing school."