My dad always gifted me books on my birthday growing up. At ten, I had all the simplified versions of literary classics like Peter Pan, Treasure Island, and David Copperfield. My grandfather, a Sri Lankan postal service administrator who took to the typewriter after retirement, had his poetry published in an American publication of the best poetry.
In my 30s, I flirted with the idea of quitting my corporate work and making a full-time living from writing. I mentioned this in passing to one of my flings. Way before I took a swing at this dream by launching a fairly successful freelance writing endeavor that lost its magic when I was pushed to promote and market products and services through writing, he got me a coffee table book on Writers, featuring one of my favorite writers, Virginia Woolf, on the cover. This book still lives prominently on my coffee table.
Also, in my 30s, my first-ever short story, My Mango, got published digitally in a UK-based publication. This story is centered around the anti-Muslim Aluthgama riots in Sri Lanka and my concerns for my family living there, while I was tucked away in North America.
When I showed it to the main man in my life at that time, he told me that I was falling for foreign propaganda and that I should never use my country as a way to get ahead on my creative path. He also hated being written about, positively or negatively, another good reason for our breakup.
Much later in life, I dated a guy who mostly read Stephen King and complained about books without page-turning plotlines. He used to send me pictures of books he was reading, and I did the same. I recommended he read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, a character-driven masterpiece, although I wasn’t sure he was going to like it.
After chatting with him daily for three months, with good mornings and good nights and everything in between, I started working on a novel for a residency application, and in response, he asked, “You write?”
