6/30/2023 0 Comments Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead![]() “And so there was a way in which I was learning about myself by reading about the inner lives of people who didn’t exist. “They didn’t happen to be real people, because I was reading fiction, but the emotion was true,” she continued. For the first time, really, I had access to the internal lives of other people. I think that a lot of that was inspired by the books that I was reading. “I began to see more complexity in the world around me, I began to have different kinds of thoughts, I began to form deeper friendships. ![]() “For me, that time was an awakening,” she said. The most formative were the ones she read around age 11 or 12, on the border between childhood and puberty. “I just sort of tried to rediscover what it was that made me feel so strongly about books in the first place.” ![]() She decided to buy all the books she could remember reading as a child, as well as books that had been written for children since. “And then I asked myself what it was that I wanted from writing, and where my connection with books began, and the answer to that question was definitely in childhood, because that’s where my connection with reading began.” “When I lost all of that, even though it was sad, it also felt like a release, in a way: it was a clean slate,” she said. ![]() ![]() Then one day her toddler knocked her computer off the table, and all the stories she had been laboring over were permanently gone. ![]()
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