I've loved books for as long as I can remember. My father often told me of how, when I was three years old, he taught me to read phonetically in the span of an afternoon. I can picture him: a slender man wearing thick eyeglasses and a mustache, sitting cross-legged on the floor of our small townhouse, slowly moving his finger across the page and sounding out words. His patience with me as I learned—a trait that, unfortunately, I have not inherited—is one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me.

Once I could read confidently on my own, I never looked back, and, like many children of the 70s and 80s, I often read late into the night, hiding under my blanket with my book and a flashlight, surrounded by a village of stuffed animals. I can't imagine my life without the world opened to me through books, but I do know it would be a lesser one. Once I graduated beyond stories of wild horses and loyal dogs, I was drawn to narratives about the uniquely human experience: books that explore moral dilemmas, hidden tensions in the relationships we have, and the consequences of the choices we make. The misunderstandings that divide us, and the ways we manage to connect despite all our flaws. 

I knew, from a young age, that I wanted to try writing—I wanted to create stories like the ones I loved to read. But I was afraid to try. Afraid to fail, actually. What finally made me brave(er) was the faith my partner put in me to tell her father's story: a story of surviving the Holocaust as a young boy, in hiding. Because I believed so strongly that it was a story that needed telling, I slowly, in fits and starts, found my way. During the ten years I spent working on The Courtyard, we experienced a global pandemic. The stark contrast between my family's experience during the shutdown and what Ben lived through as a child propelled me to write an essay, "A Matter of Perspective."