Nature. Nurture. Novels. If you grew up pre-internet – we’re talking the 70s and 80s (“the olden days”, as my daughter calls it) – books brought you up, exerting as much influence on who you were and who you became as anything, or anyone. My school friends and I, some bookish, others not, all read ourselves into being and navigated our way through the wilds of childhood and adolescence with dog-eared novels as maps. There wasn’t much else to do. And you had to get your information from somewhere.
Parents – laissez-faire baby boomers (helicopter parenting hadn’t been invented) – weren’t particularly interested and, if asked, would usually send you off in the wrong direction, to the wrong book shelf, to something dusty – “Oh, I loved Vanity Fair at your age!” – not understanding our craving for fat books with silver-embossed covers, smelling of hormones and airports and America, page corners sticky from rereading, books that showed us dazzling new worlds – outside the suburb, beneath our skirts – and had all the best lines.
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