Karen Brennan
As a child, I'd been the victim of various unkindnesses, no doubt brought on by my own difficult personality, a kind of failure to fit in coupled with disdain for others, even though I had very little self-awareness. To me the world existed inside of books, in the caves of my own imagination, so beautifully fed by books, and eventually, having cultivated the habit of imagination that embellished those dramas and visions and ethical appeals, I fell naturally into a habit of daydreaming, of insinuating myself in the center of those daydreams, in some heroic light or other. Had I only read Madame Bovary I would have perhaps recoiled from my own vanity and superficiality, but I was too lazy for Flaubert. When I finally got around to reading MB, I was too old to benefit from the lesson of poor Emma, having already married the wrong man.