There’s this troubling question I’ve been getting since my second book came out. Maybe I should have seen it coming, but my first book, which is stories and not a novel, came out with a small press and didn’t get the fanfare. There were no interviews or Q&As at reading events. So I was caught unprepared the first time someone asked, “When did you know you wanted to be a writer?”

The problem is, the answer: I was an adult. Out of college and working at an advertising agency. I’d been catching up on all the reading I should have done in high school or college since I was a business major, and after I finished reading Catcher in the Rye, the first book I’d ever read in its entirety in one day, I closed it and said, “I could’ve written that.” Embarrassing. But, it made me want to…