But yeah, my parents did read to me. And my dad’s house in particular had — my parents were divorced when I was very young, and I would go and visit my dad and he did not have any children’s books. What he had was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the complete EC horror comics, and these were horror comics from the 1950s that he had grown up with.
So, this was the literature of his childhood, and they are disgusting, like vile, terrifying stories of like evil people and monsters and there’s like a crypt keeper and a vault keeper who are like these really creepy scary-looking dudes who introduce all the stories. They’re like the hosts. And I read these over and over and over. I do not think they were necessarily appropriate reading, but they are, you know, jam-packed action storytelling and they were vivid and thrilling.
The reason I remember the horror comics is that they were so different from my regular reading, and being exposed to something radically different and then revisiting it over and over, right. I would go to visit my dad and those horror comics would still be there lurking in their disgusting way on the shelf. And it was like a doorway into another world, but the world that I was usually in was the world of children’s literature very much. I was Montessori educated, which meant that I had a huge amount of freedom in choosing my own reading and reading at my own pace.
And I wrote extensive stories in imitation of two of my favorite writers in third and fourth grade. I wrote an imitation of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren and another imitation of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken. And those books really wormed their way into my spirit as I tried to imitate what those storytellers had done.