Alvarez wrote about her expectations in American Scholar: "All my childhood I had dressed like an American, eaten American foods, and befriended American children. I had gone to an American school and spent most of the day speaking and reading English. At night, my prayers were full of blond hair and blue eyes and snow. . . . All my childhood I had longed for this moment of arrival. And here I was, an American girl, coming home at last." Life in New York was not as sweet as the ten-year-old had imagined it would be, however. Instead of feeling like home, the Bronx alienated Alvarez. She turned to the world of books, and spent a great deal of time reading and writing.
Alvarez once elaborated for Contemporary Authors, "I found myself turning more and more to writing as the one place where I felt I belonged and could make sense of myself, my life, all that was happening to me. I realized that I had lost the island we had come from, but with the words and encouragement of my teacher, I had discovered an even better world: the one words can create in a story or poem."
As Alvarez explained to Jonathan Bing in Publishers Weekly, she left home at the age of thirteen to attend boarding school and never lived at home again.
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