One of the ways I’ve been lucky is that in my mid twenties a buddy of my boy’friend’ enouraged him to read, which spilled over into my hands, and eventually when he ‘stole’ me from from boy’friend’, he encouraged me to read Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter and some Thomas Hardy and Dostoyevski, Franz Kafka, Charlotte Bronte, Aldoux Huxley, and while we were looking through the used books in Value Village, either he or I spotted Marie Claire Blais, and such authors gave me an appreciation for literature. Albert Camus is another author I just remembered having enjoyed reading from. It was The Scarlet Letter that turned the lights on as to how a man can love a woman’s mind, and express it in the written English word. Esther Prynne, banished from society for having an illegitimate child by a priest who wouldn’t confess to having fathered her, embroidered in her isolated cabin in the forest, selling her sought after work to the women who scorned her. It was 1990 when I read that novel, and I’ve known since then that a man can write intricately and lovingly of a woman’s mind. Marie Claire Blais wrote a novel, I forget what it was called. The Torrent? It was about two siblings. The girl hated her beautiful brother and deliberately would harm him and eventually cause his death. I don’t think there was a happy ending, except for her exulting in feeling victorious, which wasn’t a happy ending for an empath. For a sadist I guess it would be. It was a visceral read. To wrap this post up before it veers further off topic, I want to say that reading those books gave me the ability to communicate well using English, when I’m inclined to, and I’m just getting started.