“I also felt like a failure... for not being the autodidact I would have liked to have been. I wanted to be the kind of person who is unmoved by the push and pull of external evaluation – in the form of grades or whatever – and who just goes to the library and picks up books. I got as far as the library but I had a troubled relationship with the books themselves. You hear about people ‘devouring’ books as children, and that always gives me a twinge of envy because it was like I struggled to keep anything down. I’m not entirely sure why. I would open a book and think about everything but what was on the page. I would get distracted by everything – even by the fact of me reading a book, or by my posture or position or the light in the room. It’s a problem I still have. I’ve worked around it as far as I can, but reading is still mostly a slow and painful process.”