I wanted to run away and keep running until I was out of this sad, ugly fairy tale. There's only one way to run away from your own story, and that's to sneak into someone else's. I unwedged the leather-bound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it. I walked through it into another world.

There's only one way to run away from your own story, and that's to sneak into someone else's. I unwedged the leatherbound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it. I walked through it into another world.

I felt like a woman reading a mystery novel with every fourth line missing. There's really only one thing a person can do when they're hip-deep in a mystery novel: keep reading.

How fitting, that the most terrifying time in my life should require me to do what I do best: escape into a book.

My father—who is a true scholar and not just a young lady with an ink pen and a series of things she has to say—puts it much better: “If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.