My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school is good training for writers because it's so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.
Being at boarding school in the pre-internet era, especially a boarding school tucked away in the Oxfordshire countryside, was like being in a cocoon. You had your own life; world events happened elsewhere.
It was tough going to boarding school. It was very hard work.
I like writing about biology, not doing it.
Boarding school is a wicked thing.
To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
The huge advantage of boarding school is that it throws you into the social fire. Every social interaction I've had since then has been a million times easier. Literally, ever since then, it's all been child's play.
Ever since I was a girl, I have written about one to five pages every day - on napkins, on scrap paper, in notebooks and tablets, on the walls in my room as a teenager, and in orange paint on the cheap white plastic blinds in my room.
I have an addictive personality. Boarding school merely sent me more quickly on the downward spiral that dominated my childhood.