IN 1989, I was an eighteen-year-old hopeful writer. I kept a black-and-red notebook for storing ideas, character sketches and exotic and/or multisyllabic words. My literary pretensions led me to perform such rituals as reading a page of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood every night, as if I could somehow absorb its greatness through contact. During this period I was forever trying to read books that were culty, obscure and important, but, if I’m honest, not a lot was getting through the gate. I think now that what was missing was heart—I had no connection to those books; I couldn’t relate to them. Ulysses, Milk Wood and the others were just so much word salad. Although I considered myself well past the age of young adult fiction, somehow I found my way to Came Back to Show You I Could Fly by Robin Klein. I was familiar with Klein’s oeuvre.1 Her books, published at regular intervals throughout the 1980s, had marked, even guided, my adolescence. Like Erica Yurken in Hating Alison Ashley, I could be stroppy and jealous; like Julia in Laurie Loved Me Best, I was sometimes deluded and desperate. Unlike Frances in People Might Hear You, I was spared life in a cult, but I understood the stultification of church halls, the sad fact of stale Marie biscuits, and the feeling that my beautiful future was taking way too long to arrive.

Came Back to Show You I Could Fly might have been a gift, or I might have nicked it off someone else’s shelves, or borrowed it from the library. Maybe I bought it because the girl on the cover looked like Meg Ryan, or maybe my discovery came later when it was adapted into a sweet, quirky film by Richard Lowenstein.2 The point is, when I read it, I fell right in. All the bells rang. I realised that with the right book you don’t have to try for absorption. It just happens.

‘We all have our crosses to bear, every one of us. You can’t start too early in life to learn what’s in store and people make a big mistake thinking everything should be fun.’