Middlemarch The Golden Notebook,

Somewhere between and I decided my spiritual home was England

My belief in and love of books may be wildly disproportionate to the important things in life, but I reckon my indebtedness to the printed word is only exceeded by my debt to my parents for giving me the DNA of a bookworm. They were both readers in a dry state, in which the only bookshop was the Baptist Bookstore in a town 85 miles away.

Like the bourbon they also enjoyed, books had to be acquired in New Orleans as well as from the Book of the Month Club. The town library was a peaceable kingdom, but the librarians were self-made censors who withheld books they judged ‘not quite right’, which meant anything by John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway. I was saved by Louisa May Alcott, who revealed to me that there were two sides to the Civil War.