At night, I read and reread the handful of books I’d taken with me when I left home, and eventually, out of boredom as much as anything else, I started to write myself. It wasn’t much, at first: character sketches, accounts of my day, parodies of articles in the alumni newsletter. Then, in time, I became more ambitious and began crafting little stories about my family. I read one of them out loud to the rat catcher, who’d never laughed at anything, but roared at the description of my mother and her puppy.
