By the time I started school, everyone was telling me I could be anything I wanted, do anything I wanted to do. At home, too—I had very supportive, encouraging parents. But there was only one thing I ever wanted to be: a writer. Just a writer. That’s the wrong word, “just.” It trivializes something sacred. Writing is my connection to the universe. My only connection. If some magical surgery could scalpel it out of my soul, there would be nothing left. Without my writing, that’s what I’d be: Nothing. I knew this years before teachers started telling my parents about my “talent.” I felt it inside me, growing. It suffused every cell in my body, surging with such power that I couldn’t have suppressed it even if I had wanted to. That force crushed everything in its path. By the time I was in grade school, it was so potent that it took over my world. It wasn’t just that writing was the only thing I cared about; writing owned me. Every sense was always tuned to that same signal.
