My father was supremely dyslexic so all bedtimes became veritable campfires and I never lost my love of the spoken and then written word. Books were companions, mentors, good examples, bad influences. He gave me Hermann Hesse's NARCISSUS AND GOLDMUND the week he announced his pending divorce from my mother (I was nine) and the book sat closed and loaded for another four years. Then I read it. And for the first time I saw behind the machinery and tried writing something of my own.