“Don’t worry,” one of the other moms assured me when I joined the book group. “It’ll be a Slow-Readers Book Club. We’ll give ourselves, like, three months per book.”

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This sounded doable. I really did want to be reading more again. Reading had been a core part of my personality ever since I was a kid devouring Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins books by the stack, throughout my college years as the only English major to ever actually read everything that was assigned in literature classes, and into my adult life. But my kids were little, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a book with more words than pictures. And, I was a novelist, dammit! How could I not be reading?

Plus, I’d heard about book groups. People liked them. The cool Brooklyn moms were going to host in their spectacular homes and make book-themed cocktails and we were going to be literary and social at the same time? In those years, I didn’t get out much—the idea of leaving my apartment after dark, leaving the kids’ bedtime to my spouse, and having a glass of wine somewhere sounded practically like a jailbreak.

Book group isn’t supposed to make people feel dumb. That’s what graduate school is for! Book group is supposed to be fun.

The book group moms were all smart, creative people who read a lot and had excellent taste in novels. Like, perfect taste. They had bookshelves in their beautiful homes lined with hardcover New York Times bestsellers and books by the kinds of authors who go on Terry Gross. And, crucially, they were not writers.

I can see now that I should have taken advantage of this unique opportunity—a fun social thing that was literary and friendly and nearly free? Brilliant friends, thoughtful snacks (always an array of thoughtful snacks!), and free-flowing wine? As a reader, this should be fun. And as a writer, what a great chance to see how civilians experience literature.

And yet I couldn’t hang. Reader, I’m pretty sure I killed book group.

I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t. But somehow I was unable to quiet the literature major in my brain, who got stressed when the discussion strayed from the text. Equally noisy was the creative writing instructor, who got anxious when people read books in ways she found reductive. And then there was the novelist, who had a conniption fit every time someone said something like, “I didn’t like this character.”

Didn’t like the character? She wanted people to think about why the author might have made the character that way, what role this might play in the story. She wanted to conduct a line-by-line analysis of the scene that made people uncomfortable. She wanted to talk about how the story was shaped, and the role of metaphor. In other words, she was running a writing workshop. In other other words, she was a massive book group buzzkill.

The first reader to slip away into the night was an artist friend I had invited to join. “I don’t think I’m smart enough for this group,” she apologized. This should have caused alarm bells in that crowded brain of mine. Book group isn’t supposed to make people feel dumb. That’s what graduate school is for! Book group is supposed to be fun. It’s actually okay if, in book group, people talk about the characters as if they were other moms we know from the Y. It’s totally fine if, in book group, people say “I liked this” or “I didn’t like this.” That’s unhelpful in a workshop but guess what, the point of book group is not to offer helpful suggestions to improve the (already published) book. Nor is it to dissect the thing like you’re the most annoying kid waving your hand around in the front row of AP Lit.

No one actually said out loud that I was ruining book club, but I do remember, with a shimmer of horror, hearing myself say, “Maybe we should get back to the text” (okay actually I remember saying that several times), and the airless moments afterwards, when everyone bent over their books, chastened. Wine and gossip and fun? Not if Amy’s there—then book group is about as rollicking as Bible Study. And not a cool teen Bible Study with a guitar-playing pastor either, like a regular, unrollicking Bible Study.

I want to still be able to read like I read as a kid, lying in a beam of sunlight with a snack nearby, so engrossed in the book I’m reading that I forget to move.

After about a year, the Slow-Readers Book Group disbanded. The other moms protected me, I believe, by concluding we were simply TOO slow and what could you do! I eventually became aware that some of them had in fact joined another book group. A better, chiller, more fun, Amy-less book group, I imagine. I don’t blame them at all. I’d love to be in that book group, too.

Here’s what I wish I had taken from book group: a lesson in reading for fun. Rather than trying to make everyone read like they were writers or editors, what if I had been able to observe how they did read, even if that was far from how I read, or how I thought one should read? What if I had let them remind me what it’s like to read for fun?

It’s important for writers to learn to read like writers—just ask Francine Prose! But it’s also important for writers to remember that first and foremost, we’re readers. I know I started writing to be in conversation with the books I loved so much I couldn’t leave them alone and simply had to keep up our lopsided relationships, even if it was just in my spiral-bound notebook full of Little Women fan-fiction. I want to stay in love with books. I want to still be able to read like I read as a kid, lying in a beam of sunlight with a snack nearby, so engrossed in the book I’m reading that I forget to move, or even who exactly I am.

What’s more, I want to maintain a sense of play. There is so much in our lives—from our careers to the constant churn of the news—that is deadly serious. Having some fun, in an easy, enjoyable, low-octane, not-for-Instagram, just-really-for-fun way, has got to be good for us.

Recently, I’ve been invited to a new, very exclusive book group. It’s just me and my teenage daughter. We read rom-coms—not the kind of books I usually read, or ever write. I come to this genre with no baggage, no work to be done, and nothing to prove. These are not Great Books that we’ve chosen out of obligation or because they were on some list of what to read before you die—we simply wander into a bookstore and pick our next book based on the cover. We race through them, often in just a few days, and then we gossip about the characters. It’s not a very literary or scholarly way to engage with books.

But you know what it is? It’s fun.

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Animal Instinct by Amy Shearn is available from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.