Amy\u2019s Eyes<\/em> to me, a beautiful and surprisingly complex children\u2019s novel that is now out of print. In the character of the Bad Sister, I encountered for the first time a person who had been forced to hide her identity, and who struggled powerfully between remaining true to herself or being consumed by the mask she wore.
<\/h4>\n\n\n\nOne scene in particular, in which the Bad Sister catches her reflection in a mirror and must confront her fractured identity head-on, stayed with me from that first reading until I rediscovered the book in my teens. By that time, the concepts of duality and the struggle for identity were already firmly entrenched in my mind\u2013even though I was unaware of it then, those themes were present to some degree in every piece of fiction I had written (and still are, to tell the truth).
<\/h4>\n\n\n\nOf course, there were many other stories that influenced me: a long line of spies, superheroes, and fugitive princesses who dealt with conflicting personas in the pages of my favorite books. But it all began with a single unforgettable scene that lived on in my imagination with such power and vividity that it became part of my artistic identity forever.
<\/h4>\n\n\n\nIt became part of me on another, more fundamental level as well. All throughout elementary and middle school, when I was incessantly bullied for nothing more than being myself, I fought to keep my own identity intact. But I remembered how the Bad Sister became so lost that she no longer recognized her own reflection, and yet at the end of the book she was able to reclaim her true self.
<\/h4>\n\n\n\nThat is what I clung to all those years, what gave me the strength to hold onto the very identity that was under daily assault from my peers\u2013and what gave me the certainty that the struggle would be worth it in the end. I never looked in the mirror and saw a stranger staring back at me, but I read and wrote stories about women who did, and it saved me. And like all the stories I loved as a child, it continues to save me still.<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s a wonderful quote by Meg Ryan\u2019s character in the movie You\u2019ve Got Mail : \u201cWhen you read a book as a child,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":350,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,77,38,9],"tags":[55,17,117,116,118,18,12,19,82,13],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/childrensbooksGhostSnowUnsat.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":531,"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions\/531"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondtheyellowdoor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}