Reading was my first addiction. When I tell people this today, they laugh and nod as if they understand, as if they too are part of a secret book-addict society whose greatest crime is staying up late, a flashlight under the covers, compulsively reading page after page.

The strange thing is, no one ever asks me what my second addiction is. I mean, someone who loved to read could never be a real addict, could they? The kind of addict who steals from their family, betrays the people they love, commits felonies, implodes their life because the finding and using and finding more consumes every ounce of who they used to be. No one ever loses their job because they read too much. There are no book club interventions. The prisons aren’t full of people who stole to fund their Kindle habit.

The truth is I’ve only ever had one addiction. The white whale of addictions: escape. From as far back as I can remember there has always been a better place than wherever I am. A better me than whoever I was. Books helped me escape when I was young. Not just because of my precocious angsty-ness and early onset existential crises; they were literal escape.

Most of my early childhood memories are just stories told to me decades later. Stories of violence and starvation and abandonment.

I do remember every teacher, though, from kindergarten through high school. I remember the first multisyllabic word I read in school: policeman. I was so proud of myself as I sounded out the letters. In first grade I read Gone with the Wind—twice. It was over a thousand pages. I didn’t understand Rhett Butler or Scarlett O’Hara or the Civil War, but I savored the endless tiny print pages of word after word. I savored the escape. The longer the book the better.