I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long.
I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class. I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades.
I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.
I was filling entire school notebooks with stories by Grade 3. Of course, they were double-spaced, and the handwriting was huge.
When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write.
When my mother died, my father was in a crisis, my sister was in a crisis, everyone was in a crisis. I went round the night my mother was lying in the kitchen, and I organised everything, from the undertaker to the funeral... I looked after everybody, I sorted it all out and I've done so ever since.
Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.
When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family.
My mama loved books; I became fascinated by the wonderful stories that came out of these things she held in her hand - and started to make them up myself.
Obituaries were among my favorite to write because they have elements no other news stories have - a story from start to finish with a proper conclusion.