I grew up in a middle-class, bourgeois, secular family. My father had a big library. He was interested in art and culture, he would talk about Jean-Paul Sartre. But when I visited my friends’ houses, I discovered they didn’t have many books. Their fathers wanted them to grow up to become pashas, rich statesmen, even religious heroes. No one said: “Be an imaginative writer or an artist,” apart from my father.
My father was a dreamer who wanted to be a poet. My mother was down to earth. She would say, “Darling, if you really want to be a novelist, you won’t make money. You better be an architect.”
