I took solace in the work of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Anne Rice, Shirley Jackson, and Toni Morrison. I saw myself as Jane Eyre, Eleanor Vance, or, at my darkest, Frankenstein’s monster. I felt like my life only moved forward on the arcs of these novels, that it only had meaning when I was lost in their pages, away from the realities of being abandoned and alone.
