As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've been uncomfortable dealing with my identity since I was 16 years old.
I was reading so much about myself in the papers that was not me.
Several paranoid suspicions occurred to me, the worst of which was that my whole identity was merely a patched-together set of behaviors designed to keep my parents joined to each other - the repertoire of tricks of a small but intelligent dog.
I'm really interested in stories about identity - who I am now versus who I used to be.
That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.
My essential identity is that of a writer.
I guess I had a suspicion of it my entire life without knowing exactly what it was - knowing that there was something different about me, which I attributed to being an artist. At 11 or 12 I started sort of clarifying for myself. It took a while.
I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature. So I think that was probably my most valued characteristic as a teenager.
One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.
To me, at forty-four years old, my book was a search for truth and identity.