"My earliest reading memory I had a children's encyclopedia on the shelf above my bed orange and brown, the cover old flaking plastic but I retain nothing of what I read. I do remember a book of dirty jokes I was obsessed with at the age of eight. I was convinced it was off limits to me (it wasn't) and so I waited until my parents were at work to shamefully steal it from the bookshelf."
"I grew up in the alien boom of the 90s, when every other week there were UFO sightings and all the adults in my life were talking about The X-Files. It was very scary to me. It was my dad who gave me a copy of Douglas Adams's book. He'd loved it when he was young. It worked like exposure therapy, if exposure therapy also means making the thing you're most afraid of (aliens) ridiculous (Zaphod Beeblebrox)."
Earliest reading memories include a flaking orange-and-brown children's encyclopedia kept above a bed and a secretly treasured book of dirty jokes discovered at age eight. A mortifying moment occurred when the joke book was found under a pillow and returned with a muttered, nonjudgmental reaction. Favorite youth novels included richly detailed historical stories about teenagers forced into adult roles, exemplified by Hasse Simonsdochter and a time-travel tale in Crusade in Jeans. Douglas Adams's comic science-fiction provided reassurance during a 1990s alien scare by making extraterrestrial fear absurd. At nineteen, Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases presented a devastating tragicomedy about parents searching for a disappeared son during Argentina's Dirty War and altered previous plans regarding cosmetic surgery.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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