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How I Became a Reader, For Better and For Worse
In the beginning, it wasn’t about what books I read, it was about proving something to the world.
As a kid, I had an intense hunger for attention — an all-consuming need to be noticed, to stand out. My brain quickly gathered data from the environment and concluded that reading is the best way to fulfill these goals. Not just reading, but reading early, reading a lot, and tackling important books that left adults in awe. And everyone would know just how special I was.
My parents had been avid readers in their youth. I know this because we had an entire wall of bookshelves filled with the books they both loved once. But in the 19 years I lived under their roof, I never once saw them enjoying a book. The business of raising me and my older sister had apparently wiped that part of their identity clean.
I, however, learned how to read in the countryside, where my parents sent me for months at a time to live with my widowed grandmother. Her house had nothing to read but prayer books, but she often left me in the care of her brother, my great-uncle Vlad.
Uncle Vlad was a bachelor, and his house was filled with books, magazines and newspapers. He had a playful, wicked energy — what I’d now recognize as classic trickster vibes. He…
