Jan 23, 2020

I was raised in New York City. I had parents who were writers. So guess what I thought I would do and I would write. Though, I decided instead to become a teacher, which had set me up to teach everybody else how to write, which was a lot of fun. And that’s how it started. Although later on I did write my own book. So that’s it. I wanted to be a writer because my parents were writers.

I remember sitting there when I was three and my mother put down a piece of paper and said, “Here,” with one of these, “Here, write a novel.” I never wrote a novel. I was very young. I think I was probably four and a half or five. And I remember that I perfectly knew what the writing was about because that’s all my parents talked about. Usually crying because they hadn’t gotten their checks because they were freelancers during the Depression and then even out of the Depression. But they did manage to feed us and to get me in a good public school, luckily. We didn’t have any money for a larger dreams at the time.

I saw them on a typewriter all the time. And they were these old ones that you’ve had to like paced your fingers on, and they had such narrow fingers and I look and I have the same narrow fingers, but I think it was more just hereditary. The old, old ones, with the red and black ribbon. They worked in the 1920s through 60s. They were very large, but on the other hand you had clearer print. The typewriter that I was on with my parents and they had to kill themselves to get down. I hear them all day. They were soaking their hands. It was difficult.