Cassie McCullagh

I would also say I had no ambition to be a writer.

I just read.

I just loved reading.

But when I read Doris Lessing, I do remember making this sort of decision that if I ever could write a book, I would want to write a book like that.

But when I went to college, when I went to university, I studied science because I thought that seemed more practical if I wanted to support myself.

In the time and place where I grew up, very rural, little town, you just would never say you wanted to be a writer when you grew up.

It would be exactly like saying I want to be a movie star when I grew up.

People would just think that was silly.

I still live in a rural community, and I love rural culture.

And rural cultures have their art forms, but literary fiction didn't have the kind of understanding or respect that would have led me to it.

I had to find it on my own.

Yeah, but somehow the things she was able to say and to make me understand with my heart and with my gut, you know, I just I can still I mean, after all these decades, I can still remember passages like when her mother was folding sheets in this disapproving way looking at

Martha and saying, you're never going to be a housewife if you don't buckle up.

Reading that and feeling like, that's me.

That's my mother.

This woman in another part of the world has felt what I've felt, that universality.

It made me cry.

I had to put down the book and cry.

And I felt understood, I guess, in a way that nobody in my life understood me.

Well, I've always read the kinds of books that I would like to have written.