I am occasionally asked by colleges to give a version of a talk on how I became a writer. The easy thing to do is to give a sort of guided tour through the woods of literary self-formation: a string of anecdotes designed to elicit a few chuckles, a moment or two of reflection about the inevitable bends in the road, things that felt momentous but turned out not to matter, or things that didn’t seem significant at the time but with hindsight turned out to be the most important of all. Typically,