After Mrs. Sheedy-Shea got me writing poetry, I spent hours and hours and hours reading every book in my school library." Anderson added: "The books took me everywhere--ripping through time barriers, across cultures, experiencing all the magic an elementary school library can hold."
One book in particular that Anderson loved as a girl was Heidi, Johanna Spyri's classic tale about a little Swiss girl who is taken from her grandfather's mountain home and sent to live in the city as companion to a wealthy, disabled girl. In later years, Anderson was strongly influenced by James Joyce's classic 1939 novel Finnegan's Wake. "I read this as I was struggling to find my own writing voice. It cracked open the sky above my head. I won't pretend to understand all of it, but I return to it over and over, hungry for Joyce's words," she noted in a submission to the "The Book That Changed My Life" page of the Publishers Weekly Web site.
In Speak, the narrator finds herself viciously ostracized by her peers, and Anderson recalled enduring her own traumatic experiences with high school cliques in Syracuse, New York.
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