My grandmother died in childbirth, and my great-aunt lived with us. She had bound feet. She never knew how to read or write.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My mother wrote a book. Unfortunately, it ended up being published posthumously. But I'm glad she did, because it taught me a lot about my family that, otherwise, I probably wouldn't know.
When I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65.
I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle.
When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.
My mother read nursery rhymes to me, and my grandmother told me folk stories, but as a child I had no interest in writing whatsoever.
My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.
My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.
My mom died when I was 11 years old.
I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother.
My father died when I was quite small, so my uncle used to buy me books and read them to me.