How impossible it is to decide on a reason for writing. Why DO I write? Because it’s the only way I know to live. Another cliché: I’ve written for as long as I remember, a lonely child with only my mind for company. No books allowed! Not because I was banned from them, but because there was no sense in pursuing intellectual pursuits in a home where survival was the most basic of instincts.

There was no parental library, but there were public libraries and the school library, and the only thing that made sense then—and still does now, if not as a desire then at least out of habit, like a reflex—was to be sequestered in my own mind. My tiny self squirrelled away in a corner with stacks of books and stationery, worlds waiting to be discovered and told. Worlds that could be re-written and imagined. What if I was Claudia from The Babysitter’s Club? Or Harriet in Harriet The Spy? You could say that I wrote myself into existence, and even if my reality was bad and my brain was broken, at least there were realms I could escape to.