Meghan Daum

When she was seven, when she would visit her grandmother, Alexa would look through the books that her grandfather had owned, back when he was alive.

What she liked especially was finding the books where he'd made little notes in the margins.

Because there were hints about who he was.

Wow.

As a kid, over the course of about a year, she systematically divided the books into two piles, the ones with markings and the ones without.

And then she tried to read all the ones with markings.

Her grandfather was a playwright and a teacher, and the books were creaky old books from the 1930s about theater and about how to write plays.

It was thrilling.

And when she was 11, she wrote her very first play using the rules in the books, Rules from Another Generation.

You were 11.

But of all the books on her grandfather's shelves, there was one book that affected her more than the others.

It had lots of her grandfather's writing in the margins.

Moss Hart was a Broadway playwright, the man who directed My Fair Lady with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison.

He was married to another then luminary named Kitty Carlisle, who people these days mostly remember as a game show panelist back in the 1960s.

The book details how he started as a kid in the Bronx, found something he just loved to do, which was to make plays.

Reading it as a child, Alexa had that experience that you have sometimes as a kid.

She did not understand everything in the book, but she understood enough to know that she really, really liked it.

She read Act I by Moss Hart over and over.

She memorized long stretches.

She tried to memorize the entire book.