He was 32 and illiterate. TikTok rallied to help him learn to read.

Clare Mulroy, USA TODAY Wed, February 25, 2026 at 7:02 PM UTC

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Just five years ago, Oliver James couldn’t read. This week, he became a published author.

For 32 years of his life, the personal trainer was functionally illiterate. He was branded a troublemaker in school, but his ADHD and OCD made learning difficult. He skated by memorizing the symbols on the page. He was codependent on his loved ones, who had to help him read everything from text messages to grocery store signs.

Eventually, he became tired of hiding it. His partner encouraged him to cast a wide net for help.

James admitted it candidly, saying “What’s up? I can’t read” on TikTok, where he already had followers because of his fitness posts.

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It didn’t take long for other readers to take notice, and the BookTok community embraced him. Suddenly, he had thousands of tutors joining him on TikTok Live every night as he learned to read. He set out to finish 100 books a year, a mix of children’s picture books and adult fiction and nonfiction. And he did.

Roughly 21% of American adults are illiterate and 54% read below a 6th grade level, according to the National Literacy Institute's 2024-2025 study. James is one adult who has gone from functionally illiterate to literacy advocate, and he's chronicling the lessons learned in a new memoir, “Unread” (out now from Union Square & Co).

Oliver James on growing up ‘Unread’

Oliver James is a personal trainer, literacy advocate and motivational speaker. He's inspired others through his journey to read in his 30s.

James grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with a single mom and sister. He struggled with OCD and ADHD and, later, PTSD. His surroundings “were too chaotic and unstable for me to think or care about reading,” he writes, and school felt not like a safe place but a battleground.

His mom always stressed the importance of education, but James didn’t find the emotional or academic support to work through his learning challenges. He was sent to the principal’s office routinely, where he became isolated from his peers. He was suspended. He was expelled. He eventually joined a special education classroom. When faced with an activity with instructions he couldn’t read, he’d start a fight so he didn’t have to admit why he couldn’t follow along.

“I was treated like a problem, so I became a problem,” James writes.

He couldn’t make sense of words or sentences on the page, but he somehow always passed. He learned “how to slip through the cracks” by memorization. When texting became popular, he had friends read and write messages and then he mixed and matched to send short replies when they weren’t around. He failed his driver’s test several times until he memorized every right and wrong answer and passed. When he did get on the road, he couldn’t read GPS or road signs, so he had to memorize those too. He missed a lot of exits.

“Something that could be so simple as just filling out doctor's forms, paperwork for school, job applications ... Those things become near to almost impossible,” James tells USA TODAY.

At 19, James spent several years in jail after gun trafficking for a neighborhood man – an undercover federal agent, unbeknownst to him – who asked him to pick up and drop off packages for money. He didn’t know it was something you could go to jail for, he writes. Part of a larger sting operation, he “got caught in the crossfire.”

In prison, he passed the time working out. He eventually became a personal trainer and moved out to California. He still felt codependent on his partner, Anne, who acted as an everyday translator.

How an adult learned to read using children's books as learning blocks

The first book James read on his quest to read 100 books in one year was “365 Quotes to Live Your Life By” by I.C. Robledo. It was what inspired him to read – he wanted to feel the impact his partner intended when she gifted a copy to him. The next book he read was “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank. Though he made his way through “The Alchemist” and “The Four Agreements,” he cites children’s classics – both picture books and novels – as the most influential books. He loved “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, “Holes” by Louis Sachar and “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle.

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He likens reading children’s books as an adult to learning addition and subtraction before you move on to multiplication.

"Unread: A Memoir of Learning (and Loving) to Read on TikTok" by Oliver James is out now.

“The same messages that they put in children’s books, they're putting in the adult books, they’re just a little bit more simple,” James says. “It was able to give me the basic knowledge of emotional intelligence, the basic knowledge of empathy and the basic knowledge of how important it is for you to learn to read, how healthy it is.”

The emotional changes surprised him. He developed empathy from reading about experiences and struggles different from his own. He got better at handling his depression and ADHD by reading about it. He learned that it’s healthy to cry and often did, especially when learning to read felt hard. With his newfound community support on TikTok, his self-esteem increased. He realized no one was judging him the way he was judging himself.

Raising a new generation of readers

It could be easy to point fingers from where he is now, but there isn’t one teacher or school he blames for his illiteracy. He looks at it systemically, saying he blames “every adult, me included.”

On days when he’d rather do something else than read on TikTok Live, he takes a deep breath and hops on anyway. Sometimes he reads for just five minutes but stays on for an hour, other times he’ll stay as long as three hours.

“There’s somebody out there suffering because you ain’t talking about your issue,” he tells himself, he says. Followers have shared that he inspired them to go back to school or to learn English. “You can't be the kid and the adult. You already had your chance to be the kid. Now you're the adult. So stop putting the blame on the kids like they did to you when you were a kid.”

He thinks parents should talk to each other frankly about how their kids are reading and whether they’re struggling, and that those listening should refuse to judge. James has adopted this refreshing “it takes a village” approach so that no kid has to experience the isolation he did.

James’ young son is growing up with a drastically different relationship to reading than he had. In fact, he’s calling me from the library with him, a constant background to playtime.

“Our world revolves around it. We live at libraries,” James says, in between addressing his kid, who has spilled something off-camera. “He’s growing up with it because of me (but) it’s not like I’m teaching him … he’s just around it every day.”

At the start of the year, James was reading a chapter a day. Now he wants to go to college – in person, not online – and “redo that experience.” He wants to teach others to read. His dream is to be a professor at Harvard, he tells me.

“I want to put this to work, I want to start learning, I don’t care if I even fail,” James says. “I want to go to fail, to learn to pass.”

His next reading challenge? Textbooks.

Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at cmulroy@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: At 32, Oliver James couldn't read. He's now a published author.

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