My favorite books combining memoir, culture, myth, and poetry

Our circumstances were very different, but I feel a real kinship to her description of a childhood with oppressive/overwhelming parents and the ways in which they attempted to constrict and cripple her future simply by imposing their own world view as a matter of course on their children. Her need to break from them to find herself also echoes my own need to do the same, which I did at the same age, leaving home to go to college, in my case to work my way through college on my own despite coming from an affluent background. But as I write in my own book, living with my parents was crazy making, and my steps to assert reality simply grew over time until by late adolescence they became irresistable.

This splendid work of fiction recreates the times of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. I list it as one of the perceptions I relate in my book is how when I began reading intensely from 12 on I did so first to escape the reality around me, and then, with growing astonishment, to explore how extraordinarily varied reality was, and that what seemed impossible, or fantasy, had in many cases and at other times, been real—as the life of Hadrian had been. This had the effect of reducing the force of the claims of those around me that our reality was Reality: I began to realize 'Reality' contains multiple realities, both in the past and present, and that I need not be bound by the one I found myself within.

This too is a work of fiction that accurately reveals Pasternak's own attitudes to the Russian Revolution, and uses poetry to reveal the real stature of the novel's hero, Yuri Zhivago. I felt the attraction of a powerful alternate reality, as in Yourcenar's work, as well as an emphatic and unbending attempt to live truly. A few years after its publication, in 1957, my own drive for the same drove me to leave home traumatically. I too use my own poetry to flesh out personages and my feelings about them. Using poems within the main text with a collection at the end of the book is partly inspired by Pasternak's use of poetry in Dr. Zhivago.

Many enjoyed The Durrells of Corfu TV series, and Gerald was the young man so obsessed with local wildlife he eventually created a private zoo. He put his and his family's years in Corfu into this memoir combining his love of Nature with sharp-edged portraits of family members. He creates a vision of an 'earthly paradise,' and his contrasting evocation of those around him to that paradise immediately felt at home to me. I survived my childhood in part by turning to the natural world, not to classify but simply to become part of its own natural rhythms which I found so much more benign than the tense family currents within my home. I write of my own "Earthly Paradise" in my book.

This was published as three separate novels that tell one coherent story (I. Beat to Quarters, II. Ship of the Line, III. Flying Colours). I spent a lot of time in the Hornblower world as an adolescent, an imaginary reality I sensed wasn't wholly imaginary—The Napoleonic Wars were real—although Hornblower is fictional. But we're all heroes of our own stories. What especially appealed is the portrait of a hero divided between alternating bursts of confident action and moments of intense self-doubt. That accords almost exactly with how I was made to feel as a child, at once supremely able and a second later, consumed by doubt and a sense of inadequacy.