One of the things I love about children is that they make things up. There are monsters in their closets and under their beds but if they shut their eyes very, very tight it is a well-known fact that monsters can’t see them. My son, when he was little, could make himself invisible to monsters. Not only that, but if he ran past me fast enough he was invisible to me as well, and I wouldn’t see those extra cookies he had taken, or tell him that it was time to stop having all that fun with his friends because now we had to go home. My son was also a spy. He had powers of invisibility in that capacity, too, when he needed them.

I like to make things up myself. I like to make up characters who could be true, and put words in their mouths and thoughts in their heads that might be things that I would say or do, or that my son might, or even the man I saw once who looks very much like one of the characters in the book I am writing now.

I like to tell stories. My husband’s grandmother, a wise woman, used to say, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” By which she meant, every fact is not necessary to the telling, in the end it’s the story that matters. We are the stories we tell, every one of us. It makes us who we are, as well as entertains us, and that is where our truth dwells.

When I was very young, my mother read nightly to my sister and me, alternating between a glossy black bible filled with fables of prodigal sons and babies in bulrushes, and a battered book of fairy tales that told of goose girls and trolls. I think we had only the two books then, but they were both thrilling, and filled with wild, wonderful words that made my head spin. The first word I remember saying again and again just for the sound of it — archangel. Archangel. Not merely an angel, something far grander and more majestic. Something powerful. And thus I learned: A word beside another word and another made sentences and paragraphs and before you knew it you were completely and utterly lost in a wilderness of words. And that was a good thing.