Because my mother abandoned me, I always felt that I had done something wrong, that I was the cause of why the parents divorced. We were also very, very, very poor. You know, Grandmother trying to figure out how one piece of meat could fit and stretch to 10 people in the household, you know. And there were rats in the neighborhood. There were assaults. There was eventually the crack habit. There were all kinds of horrible things that went awry.
But in a book, I could see a different way of living. I knew about other vistas and I knew also that there were girls, heroines, who went out and changed the world. And even though they didn’t look like me, because they were human characters of course we still empathized and connected.
You know, I like to say Heidi was my soul sister and I love Jo in Little Women. You know, that they still connected and I think that they gave me the strength to get educated. I’m the first in the family to go to college. They gave me the strength to persevere. They gave me the strength to set my imagination alight so that I could share and maybe give that gift back to the world.
So, having great books written by writers and a grandmother who told wondrous stories, I was set.
