thirty-two
“I stayed put and lost myself in books. I had a decade of reading to catch up on and, because books were the place I had escaped to ever since I had learned to read, I went into a reading frenzy. I distilled what I read into sentences that occasionally had an elegance to them. I spent whole days in the library. Although ambition and work do not fill an empty Sunday-morning bed, and nothing substitutes for the joy of nuzzling the warm nape of a sleepy child’s neck, I learned to live without this. No matter that it was hard, I was ecstatically absorbed.