As a child I was the "bookworm" of my family; everybody talked about it. I read everything in sight: milk bottles and mayonnaise jars, The Bobbsey Twins and the Cherry Ames series. I was as passionate about books as my family was about cars, motorcycles, and Friday night pinochle. It was through books that I first began to see a world different from my home town-- it was not so pretty where I come from. The magic of books took me away from the fights and the dirt, the cars in the front yard, the too-little money, and the worry which filled the rooms we lived in. Nothing about my life seemed so bad when I had a book to read. Books could be borrowed from the library or stolen from the drugstore. I never cared whether I had "taste." I read them all.

It was the opening up of a novel that brought extraordinary people and events into my orbit; it was in books that I found people who felt things no one in my family admitted feeling: emotions and conflicts, sex, wrong-headed passions. People in books talked differently and scrambled my notions of normal or right. Books held promise. I was an addict at an early age, and I fought for the right to read more desperately than I struggled for anything else in my life.