Melissa Grant Writes

Ahh, childhood.

For some, summer was all about being in the sun, tanned and gloriously free.

I do remember briefly being one of those kids who loved to run, swim and bike.

But then, I hit a growth spurt, or rather, the growth spurt hit me.

Somehow, in the summer between the 5th and 6th grade, I went from being a tallish kid to a nearly 5’9” preteen who grew so fast it hurt.

Not only did I look weird, but that swift change in my body rendered me (to this day) completely uncoordinated. Instead of running around playing, I just wanted to fold my achy limbs up and stay inside.

My mother, however, had other plans for her summer and would kick me out of the house every day to play with my friends.

Luckily for my former English teacher mom, she had instilled an early love for reading in me.  So instead of banging on the door demanding to be let back in, I would hide in the garage and read Little House on the Prairie books until she let me back in, maybe 50 times each.

Little House was only the beginning. Before and alongside Laura Ingalls Wilder, there was Nancy Drew, because yes, I’m pretty old; every Beverly Cleary book I could get my hands on, James and the Giant Peach, The Borrowers, Harriet the Spy and a book of VERY gruesome Russian fairy tales that probably should have warned everyone where this was headed. Ramona the Pest was less a character I admired than one I aspired to be. And Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was practically a survival manual for an early bloomer.

By my melodramatic preteen years, things had taken a turn. I read Flowers in the Attic, which I hid from my mother, and which is considerably more horrifying to contemplate now. There was Go Ask Alice, John Saul, Judy Blume’s Forever, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Apparently, cheerful books had ceased to interest me. Also, Forever was SO sexy when you were twelve.

Meanwhile, my sister was reading Little Women, Gone with the Wind and Jane Eyre, right there…out in the open! Suck up.

Then came Stephen King. I was nearly obsessed through my teens and well into my twenties. I also tore through the Clan of the Cave Bear books, Anne Rice, Danielle Steel, and Jackie Collins; the latter two were also hidden from my mother because by then I had developed a fairly good sense of which books would result in questions I did not want to answer.

If there wasn’t a book around, I’d read anything with words on it. The clear winner here was cereal boxes, but we had an extremely outdated set of encyclopedias that were rapidly consumed, and about a million old National Geographics. Go ahead, ask me why the Taj Mahal was built because I know and was a genius at Trivial Pursuit back in the day.

I had a library card by three, and like my Amex now, it was in constant use. Other kids wanted to go to the amusement park; I would beg for an afternoon at the used bookstore, where I could sit on the cold linoleum floor and choose my next 50-cent stack.

I was weird.

After high school, I got a job in a local ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ drugstore and would spend my breaks in a room that stunk of the older clerks’ More cigarettes, consuming gossip magazines.

I learned about Elizabeth Taylor, which then sparked a long journey into salacious tell-all biographies. What do you mean Elvis Presley married a woman he met when she was 14? Well, now I have to read the roughly ten thousand other biographies out there about him, you know, for research. This led to more rock singers, which led to Jim Morrison and groupies; those are some TALES, ladies.

Somewhere along the way, tracing your genealogy became the thing to do, and in the process of doing that I fell down another rabbit hole – history. I needed to read everything I could about the British monarchy because I found I was related. Alas, I later learned everyone is, but I had my moment in the sun.

A boyfriend told me his favorite book ever was Pale Fire, I dumped him. Another friend told me to read Saramago. I tried, felt slightly breathless and wasn’t a fan. His husband told me to read Joyce Carol Oates and I worried about him.

Eventually, in my thirties, I decided to become a dog trainer and switched over to reading every book on earth about dog breeds and behavior. That career change eventually led me down the path to not simply reading but writing too.

But that’s another story for another day.