books.

Once, years ago, I invited a man I had just met into my home. I went to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine, and when I came back, I found him standing in front of my bookshelf. "I could love you for your books alone," he told me. At the time, it was one of the most romantic things anyone had ever said to me, and although our relationship quickly fizzled, his comment followed me from apartment to apartment, bookshelf to bookshelf, as I packed and unpacked my ever-growing book collection. I could love you for your books alone.

So, as you can imagine, the only thing more daunting than minimizing the closet was minimizing the bookcases. They were so daunting, in fact, that we saved them for last. Between the two of us, we have 4.5 degrees in various forms of literature/writing/communications/publishing...a situation which ultimately amounted to a whole lot of student loan debt, and a set of floor-to-ceiling bookcases, overflowing with books we'll probably never read again.

Still, it was hard to let them go. With the exception of Infinite Jest, which I bought solely because I felt like I should, I've actually read every single book I own. That's not to say I enjoyed them all; some of them I kept because I felt like I earned them. I mean, I did my time. I mucked my way through stacks of Derrida, Proust, Joyce and Foucault, and I wore those books like battle scars; symbols of hard-won A's from curmudgeonly professors.

But my student years have passed, and I no longer need them. One by one, they went into moving boxes, bound for resale at Harvard Book Store.

Then there were the theatre books. Scripts and craft texts from decade of theatre classes and workshops. I'd kept them based on a vague notion of perhaps needing them someday, but let's face it, that day has yet to come, and I very much doubt I'll ever sit down with Stanislavski to ponder the Magic If again.

So, off they went to a fellow actor and theatre enthusiast.

Finally, there were the heartstring books. These are the ones I truly love; either because the author is a dear friend, or because the book changed my life in some tangible way. There was no easy way to minimize these, and I agonized over my choices. Ultimately, we decided to keep representations rather than entire collections. So, one Vonnegut. One Sexton. One Rushdie. One Coetzee. One complete edition of Shakespeare (the Riverside won). We kept the best and most beloved of our favorite writers' works, and let the rest go. The one exception was Charles Simic, whose writing is the closest thing I've ever had to a Gospel. I reach for his work again and again, for so many reasons, and refused to part with a single volume.

If you had asked me last month how many books we owned, I would have guessed somewhere around 200. As it turns out, we owned close to 500. Of those, 350 were either sold or donated. We kept 120 -- enough to fill about 3/4 of a bookcase. It was disconcerting at first. I mean, I'd essentially forgotten what empty bookshelves even look like. But now that it's done, and our books have found their way to their new homes, I am at peace with it. After all, books are never really gone. If I ever miss them, we can reconnect on kindle, or at the library, or within a friend's collection. Having them on a shelf doesn't make me any smarter, or cooler, or more legitimate.

And as for the guy who wanted to love me for my books? Spoiler alert: He turned out to be a pretentious ass.