Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
That was probably the stamp that went into my mind, because I worked in television for many years, doing that kind of music, so that really was my strong forte.
A Hallmark card with paragraphs about my beauty written by a stranger is vaguely depressing.
With my first book, 'A Letter to a Young Brother,' I figured it would be my only book I was ever going to write. What happened with that is a lot of young men would reach out to me.
It was early on in 1965 when I wrote some of my first poems. I sent a poem to 'Harper's' magazine because they paid a dollar a line. I had an eighteen-line poem, and just as I was putting it into the envelope, I stopped and decided to make it a thirty-six-line poem. It seemed like the poem came back the next day: no letter, nothing.
At the time I wrote 'Forever,' I had a 14-year-old daughter, and she was reading a lot of books about young love.
In 2nd grade, a girl who was a friend of mine gave me a homemade valentine. Like, a real, handwritten one!
The first thing I started collecting was stamps. Until I started discovering girls. That was the end of stamps.
The day I got my first letter from a fan, I felt like I'd been touched by an angel.
I remember getting this scrapbook that this girl made, that I actually gave to my mom to hold onto because she has a 'Twilight' shrine in their house in Florida. It was just this scrapbook of me, starting with 'Twilight,' and the whole progression of me and my career throughout that, and other stuff that I had done in between.
I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.