Learning to Write

I became a bookish child in several steps. At six I went to live with my parents. Everyone in my home read. My mother read nursery rhymes to me while I ate in order to get me to enjoy eating. My mother read novels herself to pass the time when she was at home with her child. My father read Book of the Month Club selections.

But my respect for reading and writing began much earlier. I was brought up mainly by my grandfather until the age of six. He would write at the dining room table on Sunday mornings. Everyone was hushed while he was doing this important work. The importance of writing and reading were impressed on me indelibly. Only much later I learned that he was addressing envelopes for the immigrant society of which he was the secretary.

When my mother read those nursery rhymes to me she was coaxing me to eat the simple, bland American food she cooked, though I longed for my grandmother's spicy, salty complex Middle European cooking. What I couldn't have known is that my mother was teaching me English, and at the same time was teaching me how to read. She was also giving me a taste for poetry.

So her motives were complex even while her cooking was not.

I was a lonely child, often left to my own devices when my mother was in bed trying not to have a miscarriage. I longed for the grandparents who were my emotional home. I read stories about other little girls. Heidi by Johanna Spyri was my favorite. In that story a little girl leaves unhealthy city life to go live with a grandfather on a mountain. There she meets a wild little boy, spends lots of time outdoors, eats toasted cheese, and grows healthy herself. The story fit my dream of going back to be with my grandfather, having other kids to play with, and being healthy.

Without conscious design I was also constructing a female self by reading women authors to help me disidentify with the grandfather who