I grew up the only child of older parents. If I were to give you a list of all the facts of my early life that made me a writer, this one would be near the top. Only child. Older parents. It now almost seems like a job requirement-though back then, I wished it to be otherwise. A lonely, isolated childhood isn't a prerequisite for a writing life, of course, but it certainly helped. My parents were observant Jews. We kept a kosher home. On the Sabbath, from sundown on Friday evening until sundown on Saturday, we didn't drive, we didn't turn on lights, or the radio, or television, and I wasn't allowed to ride my bike, or play the piano, or do homework. This left me with a lot of time to do nothing. Most Saturday mornings, I walked a half-mile to synagogue with my father while my mother stayed home with a sinus headache.
Our house was silent and spotless. Dirt, smudges, noise-any kind of disarray would have been unthinkable. Housekeepers were always quitting. No one could keep the house to my mother's standards. Every surface gleamed. Picture frames were dusted daily. Sheets and pillowcases were ironed three times a week. My drawers were color-coordinated: blue Danskin tops perfectly folded next to blue Danskin bottoms. The exterminator came monthly. The toxic mold guy made biannual visits. Summers, the lawn man came every few days with his mower and hedge trimmer, clipping our suburban New Jersey acre into shape.
Control was important. It wasn't the messiness of life that we were girding ourselves against. Secrets floated through our home like dust motes in the air. Every word spoken by my parents contained within it a hidden hard kernel of what wasn't being said. Though I couldn't have expressed it, I knew with a child's instincts that life was seen by both my parents as a teeming, seething, frightful hall of mirrors. Something had made them scared. They tried to protect me from themselves, from their own histories-das kind, one of them would whisper harshly and they'd stop talking after I entered the room. I loved my parents, but I didn't want to be like them. I didn't want to be afraid of life. The trouble was, their way was all I knew.
And so I spent my childhood straining to hear. With no siblings to distract me, I had plenty of time, and eavesdropped and snooped in every way I could devise. I lurked outside doorways, crouched on staircase landings. I fiddled with the intercom system in our house, attempting to tune in to rooms where one or both of my parents might be. I riffled through filing cabinets when my parents were out to dinner and the babysitter was downstairs watching "The Partridge Family." I haunted my mother's closets-the cashmere sweaters in individual plastic garment bags, the shoes and purses in their original boxes. What was I hoping to find? A clue. A reason. We had telephones in almost every room, but the one in my mother's office had a little doohickey that you could lift up, preventing anyone from picking up another extension, and listening in. I noticed that whenever my mother was on the phone, she used it. What was she saying that I wasn't meant to hear?
I didn't know that this spying was the beginning of my literary education. That the need to know, to discover, to peel away the surface was a training ground for who and what I would grow up to become. The idea of becoming a writer was more remote to me than becoming an astronaut. I didn't know any writers. Our neighborhood wasn't an artistic hotbed. I didn't draw parallels between the books I loved, and read every night under the covers with a flashlight, and the idea that someone-a woman, say, alone in a room, wrestling with words and thoughts and ideas-could in fact spend her life writing them.
I slunk around like a detective. I learned to hide on the staircase without making a sound. I wanted to unearth the sources of my parents' pain, though it would be many years before I would begin to understand it. All I knew was this: life seemed sad. It seemed parched, fruitless, devoid of joy. By the time I was eleven or twelve, I began to escape into my room and to write. I discovered my imagination, where I was free of my father's sorrow, my mother's headaches. I was free from the sense that my parents were disappointed in each other, and from my fear that they would be disappointed in me. I was free from das kind!, and the Sabbath rules. I closed and locked my bedroom door-take that, parents!-and I made up stories. Sometimes I wrote them as letters to friends. Sometimes I pretended every word was true.
I wondered if I might be crazy.
I had no idea that I was becoming a writer.
