While her friends learned to jump rope and roller skate, Oneal spent much of her childhood and adolescence writing. "I learned to ride a bike.... Got through sixth grade, then eighth, then high school, writing all the time. In those days I mainly wrote stories having to do with love (which I didn't know much about), set in places I'd never seen. From time to time somebody would suggest that I try writing about something I knew. But what did I know? Nothing interesting.
"In college I took writing courses, and once--just once--a professor praised a story. It happened to be a story about my sister and myself, about the day I realized that she was still a child but that I was not. This was something I knew about. I remembered the day, the sunlight on my sister's fine hair, her doll with its missing eye. I remembered the smell of the grass being cut and of strawberries being boiled into jam. Most importantly, I remembered how I felt. And so it turned out to be a pretty good story.
"It would be nice to say that I learned something from that. I didn't, or only much later.
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