The magnificent, Nobel-Prizewinning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez died yesterday. You can read a fitting tribute to him by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times here.

It’s rare for me to be able remember where I was when I read a novel, even a favorite, but I remember exactly where I was when I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez’s first masterpiece. That memory remains intertwined with my memories of the book itself, which now serves as a kind of window to a time when I felt as if one book could change my whole view of the world.

It was 1978, spring break of my junior year of college. My English professor had assigned One Hundred Years of Solitude in Gregory Rabassa’s outstanding translation, and I’d just finished the book’s breathtaking final passage. I will never forget lying in my bed at my parents’ house in Brooklyn at 3:00 AM, staring at the ceiling, my heart pounding so hard I could hear the blood moving around inside my body. I knew I wouldn’t sleep again that night; I wondered if I’d ever sleep again without experiencing dreams as vivid as the ones Garcia Marquez had conjured up in his novel.

I can’t say that Garcia Marquez inspired me to be a writer;  before I knew his name, I dreamed of writing my own novels. But One Hundred Years…., along with Love in the Time of Cholera, Innocent Erendira, and his other works, showed me how much joy and humanity writers can pour into creating worlds, universes, if they hold nothing back. But that was the key, the lesson I would never forget: Hold nothing back.

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