"Girl Hood: On (not) Finding Yourself in Books"

"Girl Hood: On (not) Finding Yourself in Books," Her Kind, January 2013.

When you grow up poor, sometimes books are the only connection you have to the world that exists outside your neighborhood. You begin to imagine that the people in those books matter. You imagine that they are important—maybe even immortal—because someone wrote about them. But you? When you fail to find yourself in books—or people like you, who live in neighborhoods like yours, who look like you and love like you—you begin to question your place in the world. You begin to question if those people who make up your neighborhood and your family are worth writing about, if you are worth writing about. Maybe no one thinks about them or you. Maybe no one sees you.