Meg Rosoff

They would explain to me,

about the latest boyfriend that was disastrous and what did I think and it was going so you know what did he mean by this and I said look I know it's a really unpopular boring opinion but actually I believe that when it's right it's easy you know and you know when you meet somebody who you really can spend time with and who you really can have a long-term relationship with

It's easy.

It's not that all the games aren't there.

All the questions, all the what shoes should I wear?

How should I wear my hair?

Kind of disappear.

Now, maybe that makes me a hopeless romantic.

But certainly after years and years of bizarre, I mean, I wouldn't particularly call them toxic, but just bizarre relationships that for one reason or another, you know, I tied myself into a thousand knots to try to make them work.

the lengths that people go to to try to convince themselves that true love is just an inch or two away if only you can cross that gulf.

You know, like most lonely children and young adults, when I say young adult, I mean, you know, in my 20s, I escaped into books.

I mean, most people of my generation, now everybody escapes into the internet.

But in those days, I've read and read and read and read.

And in order to get through my 20s in New York City, which was a,

quite a difficult decade for me.

I don't know if most people admit to having a whole difficult decade, but I've had many of them.

And the one thing that kept me going was every Saturday morning, I would sleep late, get up, walk down from my apartment in the East Village down to the Strand Bookstore, which advertised itself as having something like 55 miles of books.

And I bought Virago

books, which were published in England by Carmen Khalil.

And they were sort of forgotten classics, all by women, and mostly domestic novels.