"My Mancunian grandmother, who left school at sixteen to work, was a very smart, insatiable reader. She was thrilled when I went to study English at university for three years, but still read far more than I did in that time. I remember thinking it might have been better, certainly cheaper, to enroll with her. She would mail me novels (always beautiful editions) and I would read the back, maybe a first line, and then pile them up beside my bed and feel guilty for not having the time amid weekly essays. My experience of ‘reading’ then could be more accurately described as ‘coloring.’ Extended procrastination followed by an intense period of highlighting, looking for key words and retaining nothing. Always in a post-midnight panic. Always, it felt like, incomprehensible lines of Chaucer. By the time it came to final exams, I’d read practically nothing post-1960 and so was pretty clueless in conversations about books other people had read. It wasn’t until after I finished my degree and my grandmother was very sick that I finally discovered the meaning of ‘reading for pleasure,’ and got round to chipping away at the books she’d sent, most of which I’d politely pretended to have enjoyed in my thank-you calls. I began with a beautiful blue Virago edition of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, and was electrified. As Rhys’ Antoinette and Jane Eyre’s Bertha began to fuse in my mind, connecting an old favorite novel with a new one, the initial electrical jolt turned into a mixture of rage, wonder, and self-reproach for having put the experience off for so long. I realized I’d probably only told her I “liked” it on the phone. I rang her again, admitted the lie, and told her I wanted to write my own. She laughed and said ‘I knew it. Good. Get on with it.’"