In 2021, fitness influencer Oliver James had a massive social media following and a secret he had been keeping from all those people — and most of his real-life friends and family members:
He didn’t know how to read.
At 32, James was living a lie, using technology, his memory, and those around him to conceal the fact that he never learned that symbols make letters, which make words, which make meaning. At school, he struggled with undiagnosed learning disabilities and mental health challenges. He never failed a grade, but he also never learned to read.
His new book, Unread: A Memoir of Learning (and Loving) to Read on TikTok, chronicles how James became one of more than 45 million functionally illiterate adult Americans — and how he used the very tools of our post-literate society to finally master the complexities of reading.
The memoir begins with that day in 2021, when he pressed the red record button on his phone and uttered what he says were five magic words to his TikTok following: “What’s up? I can’t read.” That post went viral, and it didn’t take long for the BookTok community to embrace him and pledge to help him on his journey. Thousands of tutors — many of them teachers and professional reading coaches — joined him on TikTok Live every night as he learned to read.
He set a goal of reading 100 books in a year, and one by one, he knocked them out, from Goodnight Moon to Stone Soup to Charlotte’s Web to The Alchemist. The whole list is included in the back of James’ book.
Each chapter of the memoir also uses a specific book to help illustrate the author’s point. S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders helped him understand social divides — “the way people get trapped by the labels society puts on them and how those labels can shape your entire life,” James writes. He relates to main character Ponyboy Curtis, he says, because “like me, Ponyboy is trying to understand the world beyond what he’d been told.” And when Johnny tells Ponyboy to “stay gold” — “that hit me so hard,” James writes. “It’s about holding onto the part of yourself that still believes in something. That still hopes. That still sees beauty, even when life is ugly. … Reading gave me that.”
In Unread, James tells the full story of his journey from illiteracy to authorship, including how not knowing how to read made day-to-day life difficult. He couldn’t follow a GPS because he couldn’t read road signs. He could give a friend a birthday card but not really know what it said. He couldn’t play board games or read instructions on a pill bottle. He could not shop for ingredients to cook a specific dish, because he couldn’t read a recipe. “You can’t even make Kraft Mac & Cheese if you can’t read the instructions,” he writes. “I had to be shown how, then memorize it.” He continually depended on others to understand basic information, and that led to feelings of inadequacy, guilt and self-blame.
James’ memoir sometimes gets repetitive, as it’s more about reflections than plot. But it offers insight on a largely silent crisis affecting about 21% of Americans. It’s a poignant story of courage and resilience, and a moving reminder that it’s never too late to learn.
