I wasn’t a real big reader and I wasn’t a very confident reader early in life. In fact, when I was in second and third grade, that’s when I was struggling the most. And you know, looking back, you try to figure out like, “Why wasn’t I into books, why wasn’t I a reader, why did I struggle?”
And it was pretty easy to see the answer. First of all, I never had reading modeled for me. I never saw anyone reading for pleasure. The only time we saw books were in the school setting. And if you don’t feel confident in the school setting, then you don’t feel like some of the stuff in that setting is for you.
But then if you’re not good at something, like it was hard for me to learn to read, you just sort of like – you’re not there to succeed inside of a book; you’re there to survive, right? And I think that’s such a common thing among reluctant readers. So yeah, it took me a little bit longer to learn how to read and be a confident reader.
But I will also say that by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade I became a pretty good reader. The problem is, I was still carrying with me this idea that I wasn’t intelligent. And I think I was just kind of passing along. And I don’t think me or many of the kids I went to school with were truly seen by the system. So, you know, I was allowed to think of myself as unintelligent, on into high school and no one was really there to tell me different. So it wasn’t until I got to college that I became somebody who was confident intellectually.
And here’s the interesting thing: Looking back, I actually was pretty good at reading the world. Like, I had a good idea of what was happening around me. I could see underneath what people were saying and people’s actions. I could understand motivations. I just hadn’t transferred that to the written word.
And I think once I learned that there was a link between what novels do and what I was doing naturally, it was like, “Oh, there’s a place for this. This is where people do that. They talk about what they are seeing, and that maybe other people aren’t noticing.” So it was kind of a natural fit for me to write novels. Even though when people talk about my background of being a non-reader, it’s surprising that a non-reader would become a writer, but it’s actually a better fit than you would think.