I went through a stage of writing my cramped hand in tiny books. My two sisters and I did have our Bronte period. My mum is from Yorkshire, and we would go up to the Moors. It tapped into our romantic visions of ourselves.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself.
I had a complicated life until I was 25. I was born in Bristol and was brought up by my mum and my stepfather in Edinburgh. He introduced me to books.
In my thirties I found myself, to use a colloquial fiction, in a suburban house at the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Married and with two little daughters, I led a life which would have been recognizable to any woman who had led it and to many others who had not.
At school, we'd studied the Romans and the Saxons, and I was fascinated by it all. So I made my dad take me to the British Museum as often as possible.
I was raised on a farm in Kansas where we lived next door to my Grandma Dew, and I was her shadow. We went everywhere together - to the bank, the doctor, the Early Bird Garden Club, and to an endless procession of Church meetings.
I seem to be quite drawn to the medieval, magical fantasies, as it were.
As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.
My whole life was foretold to me. An old Romany gypsy read my fortune.
When I was little, I grew up in a place called Hertfordshire, which is just near London, but out in the country, and I visited Pakistan in the summers to go and see my family on my dad's side.
I grew up in the countryside in the middle of nowhere in England and got out as soon as I could!