My earliest reading memory
I have a blur of a memory of sounding out the words to Dr Seuss’s The Pale Green Pants – “Then I was deep within the woods / When, suddenly, I spied them. / I saw a pair of pale green pants / With nobody inside them!” – while my mother helped me along. The clearer memory is of seeing my trousers draped over a chair in my bedroom, and wondering, half-scared and half-hoping, if they were going to rise in the air while I slept – my first literary nightmare.
My favourite book growing up
My local librarian recommended Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Headless Cupid, a ghost story in which one’s siblings are the scariest part of the haunting. I read this book to tatters.
