Starting in my twenties, working in upstate New York and then in Detroit, followed by the Chicago suburb of Naperville, I was told by different key professional people that I was a really good writer.
Myself, I had so much trouble believing that because I felt insecure about what I wrote for the newspapers I worked at and was always waiting for the "other shoe to drop." I just didn't think I was competent enough to write for a daily paper on deadline.
But for those close enough to me that openly admired my work, I told them consistently, "I didn't do anything to deserve it. The only books I really wanted to read in my mid-teens were Harlequin Romance paperback novels."
The thing that engaged me was the romance. I especially liked the ones written by Great Britain authors, where you could actually get to the very last page of the paperback before they had their first kiss!
Years later I realized that, between the old romantic movies I watched on TV and the Harlequin Romances, I might have doomed myself for ever finding a mate!!!
What I remember most, and this is a shocking thing for me to tell people, is when I slowly, vaguely realized my dad had an unhealthy attraction to me when I was 13-15 and wanted to know where I was all he time (mostly because he was always wanting me to work at his doctor's office), I cleaned out the closet in my little room (my mom converted her sewing room into a bedroom so I could finally be separate from my older sister) and put a gooseneck reading lamp in it that had an extension cord running to the electric outlet.
I would literally hide in the closet with just that little light going and read my Harlequins without him knowing where I was. The only dead giveaway, and it became the thing that eventually "ratted me out," was my dear Shih-Tsu would inevitably come scratching at the closet door, wanting me to let her in.
The bottom line is these Harlequins, at a very crucial period in my life, could very well be why I turned out the way I am--a single woman in her 60s who's never been married!
To make a point on that reality, when I had my first boyfriend in my junior year at Ohio State University, he started to really fall for me. He finally let me know that in his own way, and I told him, because I did not share his attachment that way, that he was "not Cary Grant"!
We happened to be in his car when I said this, on the way home from celebrating his birthday at a fancy seafood restaurant in downtown Columbus, and he later told me that after he dropped me off at the off-campus house I shared with two roommates, he took the wrapped present I gave him and tossed it out his passenger window as far as he could throw it!
Thankfully he remained my friend and he's the one who said, after I finished a summer "tryout" on the sports desk of the Detroit News immediately preceding my first job in Elmira, NY, as a bureau chief for the Elmira Star-Gazette (the very first Gannett newspaper!), because I just couldn't take working alone anymore, "Hey, let's move to Chicago!"
If he hadn't proposed we do that, I would never have been introduced to my church and who knows what would have happened to me!!!
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