Nonfiction | September 01, 2008

The full text of this essay is not currently available online.

Lee Smith said somewhere that as a girl she would write out additional chapters when she reached the end of a book, conjuring alternate endings that would sprawl on for pages. Because I grew up in a working-class family of little education, I was more apt to grab tools or weapons-a torque wrench or crossbow, say-than I was a pencil or typewriter as a way to extend the story at hand. But I see now that our hunger was the same.

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