I like to think that there is a lovely distinction between aloneness and loneliness, and the real reader will rejoice in the one and never know the other.Īnyway, I read. There is, after all, something to be said for aloneness, at least in my case, because it led to books. It's no wonder that that library and attic keep turning up in the things I write. Nothing to do, that is, until I discovered the library that had been a church (open three afternoons a week, and with the fiction section two steps up, where the altar used to be), and for the off-days, my grandmother's attic (and all the books my mother and aunt had read as children). I spent a part of every summer visiting my grandmother on the eastern shore of Virginia, where the days were long and hot and there was absolutely nothing to do. It has, in part, to do with being an only child, often alone. Whenever I try to piece together anything even slightly resembling an autobiographical sketch, I find that a lot of my remembering has to do with books: what I read (almost anything) where I read (almost anywhere) and why.
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