Yet I loved the narrative voice, too. I was safe reading about it. I wrote loads of dog stories during the years I absorbed the books of Albert Payson Terhune, and in high school my romantic fantasies were almost always in sonnet form, inspired by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Mimicry and a sense of safety combined to create my relationship with the written word that made me an actor. At least among my age-peer colleagues this seems a common background.
Mimicry is natural to all children, but safety seems, increasingly, to be a modern privilege.
To pay attention to a book, it must be safe not to pay attention to the world. This image remains with me as a brilliant depiction of attention deficit disorder. Scripts serve up words in dense blocks, word-briquets that are slow to ignite, with the character's name above them. Verbs contain clues to what the character wants, consciously and subconsciously. The commitment to act professionally requires a grown-up bravery that allows actors to explore the recesses of memory, peeling away layers of social conditioning and shame in order to embody even unattractive human experience.