I can’t pinpoint exactly when I started imagining myself in the stories I read but I know it was at a young age. Some of the first books I really connected with were Sweet Valley Twins, a US series about blond, blue-eyed twin sisters who lived a very middle-class white life I could barely picture. I knew on some level that I wouldn’t exist in their community, where there was no suggestion of cultural diversity. But I wanted to, so in my daydreams about the twins and their world I added an Indian girl to their friendship group.
Even as a child I knew that the onus was on me to stretch my imagination to include myself; it was not on the writers to incorporate diversity in their stories in the first place.
