I would not call books an escape if that meant that I was only hiding out in them for fear of something else. They were glorious places to be, and they set my mind on fire and brought me in contact with the authors themselves, indirectly in their fictions, directly in the essays and journals and first-person accounts that I gravitated to as I came to understand that my own vocation was going to be essayistic nonfiction. I swam through rivers and oceans of words and their incantatory power. In fairy tales naming something gives you power over it; a spell is some words you say that make things
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