The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today links to this interview, in which the first question asked is:
Did you grow up in a literary family?
Mother was entirely fictional. So dad had
various girlfriends and some of them, pitying us,
would sometimes read out extracts from her life.
My sister and I would argue about who was
the protagonist. She always thought it her while I,
uncertain, dithered over people met that day.
My uncle lost his appendix, and later on the plot,
eventually misplacing all the contents pages
for his mind, his life, and his wife: Aunty Peggy...
who lived, we thought, for forty years in the mad attics
with the first Mrs Rochester, and a portrait
of Doreen Grey -- now into her second childhood.
The old die old, the good die good and, they hope, well
and all my pages grow sepia at the edges
while my spine stiffens and small print blurs.
My sister failed to become the villain, married badly;
tried again, with a book-shopkeeper's son called Sid,
and now swells well with a kid and a sequel to come
and what have I done. It seems I am the focus
character after all and I hope I haven't bored
my readership along the way. Did I grow up
in a literary family? Well actually
I haven't literally grown up at all.
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