If You Lose All Hope, You Can

Construed As Turf, Home Just Seems A Provisional Claim, A Designation You Make Upon A Place, Not One It Makes On You. A Certain Set Of Buildings, A Glimpsed, Smudged Window-view Across A Schoolyard, A Musty Aroma Sniffed Behind A Garage When You Were A Child, All Of Which Come Crowding In Upon Your Latter-day Senses -- Those Are Pungent Things And Vivid, Even Consoling. But To Me They Are Also Inert And Nostalgic And Unlikely To Connect You To The Real, To That Essence Art Can Sometimes Achieve, Which Is Permanence.

I Think That's The Thing That Memoir Can Do More Than Anything It Does; It Testifies And Bears Witness To The Existence Of People Whose Lives, Pleasures And Virtues Would Never Have Been Testified To Without My Having Done It. That Makes Me Really Glad.

I'm Dyslexic. If You Can Reconcile Yourself To Not Being Able To Burn Through Books, Which You Shouldn't Any Way, You Can Slow The Whole Process Down. Then, Because Of My Disability, There Is More For Me In Imaginative Literature Than There Is For Other People.

The Art Of Living Your Life Has A Lot To Do With Getting Over Loss. The Less The Past Haunts You, The Better.

I Started Reading Literature At 17 Or 18, And I Felt This Extra Beat To Life.