I was queer: in books, I met other people who were. I wanted to have a "better" life: in books, I met people who did. I read the whole encyclopedia many times over, fascinated by the wheat crop figures in the USSR, the kinds of snakes in Japan, the reason for the speed of light. I tried out new places to live and other languages. I was a child in the Himalayas, and I first met lesbians in the soft-core porn I was stealing from the place next to Woolworth's; books gave me ideas.

Meanwhile, my mother and I were at war. I was at an age where I would brook no interference from her. She didn't agree. In my senior year, I was sent away on scholarship to an upper-class school to create some peace for us both. I returned home without many clothes and with a suitcase of books. I brought them all back, including the most pretentious I had read that year. I had been introduced to "good" books, and I took to them with the same stubborn determination which had kept me reading bad ones.

That year in boarding school had been terrible for me. I was different and stupid-seeming to most of the students, and most of the time, I agreed with them. I felt ignorant and unpracticed in all they took for granted. But the one thing they had that I could figure out was books. I was being introduced to a literature which I could never have discovered or understood in my home town. Night after night I stayed up after curfew trying to catch up. I tried to span the distance between the other kids and myself in eight months-- a difference created by the years when they had been surrounded by literature, poetry, and music alien to my world. In the end, I couldn't cross that distance, but the race between me and words set in motion a flight from the deadening effects of too much hard work and a rush towards learning which I had been fearing and desiring all my life.