I learned to read when I was three years old and I haven�t stopped since. I read all the time. I can�t help it. I bring books into the bathroom with me when I brush my teeth (and balance them on my lap while I floss, pages held open with my elbows) and if I forget the book I read the fine print on the mouthwash bottle and the toothpaste tube. I don�t quite realize I do it; it�s practically automatic. My brother would snap at me at the breakfast table, �Stop reading the cereal box!� and I would look down at my hands and they would be holding the box while I read it, unaware.

I got my first library card when I was six, and until I was eighteen and went to college, my parents took us to the library every three weeks, when the books we took out the last time were overdue. The library was (and still is) more exciting to me than a toy store; I don�t even feel that same exhilaration in a book store. No, for me the library was an extension, an enhancement, of home; familiar and safe, yet full of infinite possibility. I could read anything I wanted to, any author, any subject, fantasy or mystery or biography, absolutely anything I wanted to know was within my reach, and the half hour we spent in the library was never enough. During the last ten minutes I would race around the stacks pulling books off the shelves and onto the growing pile in my arms and it was always a trick of balance and strength to get all of those books to the checkout counter without them falling, and I always did it. In every town and city I�ve ever lived, getting a library card was always one of the first things I did, and libraries have been my sanctuary, my homecoming, my haven.

When I was ten, I discovered the true crime section, and was immediately transfixed. I was old enough to understand them and young enough to still be scared. I devoured them. I read about forensic science and medical examiners and later in the evenings I would sleepwalk into the living room as my parents watched TV or into their bedroom as they slept and I would sleeptalk, trying to explain about ballistics testing and shotgun stippling � mumbling, frustrated, not making sense � until my mother would gently guide me back to bed. In the bedroom I shared with Marty, with the twin beds parallel to each other covered in the brown ribbed bedspreads that made me think of corrugated cardboard, I read about an army doctor who murdered his wife and daughters while they slept. At night my sleep was restless; I was unable to not ruminate over how a father could do that and once I finally slept my dreams were of my grandfather forcing us into the basement with a gun in hand. I didn�t finish the book until a few years later.

For the most part, however, I read about the serial killers � Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, the Hillside Stranglers, Son of Sam � and while they terrified me, as I shivered under the covers afraid of stray noises, I soon came to recognize that the danger was outside. The books taught me that I would be protected if I didn�t hitchhike, didn�t help strange men with crutches, didn�t park in cars in secluded areas. I knew my mom and dad were safe, Marty was safe, my cats were safe, and as long as I avoided those carefully delineated situations, I was safe too.

When I was ten, I discovered my father�s hidden cache of reading materials and they were nothing I would have found in the library. He kept his stash of Hustler magazines in the linen closet across from the bathroom and his dime store pulp triple-X paperbacks in the bottom dresser drawer. These were books with titles like Auntie in Bondage, The Hardup Housewife, The Devil in Aunt Lisa, and I would furtively sneak into their bedroom when I was alone (always looking over my shoulder, listening for the garage door, trying to time their arrival) and consume these stories compulsively, stories of women so insatiable that they would have sex with anyone and anything, anywhere, any way, they couldn�t get enough and I couldn�t get enough either. I would read and read, aroused and flushed and trying to ignore the sickened feeling in my stomach as I silently compared myself to those women � and those pictures in the magazines, pictures of women looking like no one I�d ever seen before, who looked nothing like me � I compared myself and I knew that I would never measure up, always be left wanting, lacking.

As I grew up books remained my constant and my shield, protecting me from the unbearable feeling of not belonging, never belonging, not knowing how to belong. As my contemporaries talked about makeup and boys and fashion (an automatic exclusion; plus size fashion didn�t exist when I was a teenager) and went on dates, I immersed myself in my literary world, reading about crime and social policy and scientific theories, all the time convincing myself that I was superior to these flighty girls (a concept that was more than reinforced by my mother) and who wanted a boyfriend anyway? All the while I continued to delve into that forbidden and foreboding stash of books every time I was alone in the house.

I didn�t kiss a boy until I was sixteen. There had been no childhood games of Post Office or Spin the Bottle for me; while I pined painfully after any boy who said one kind word to me in passing � aching and invisible - my evenings and weekends were spent at home with my family, reading, and there was no opportunity available, and I preferred it to the inevitable rejection I knew would have awaited me if I had such a chance. So, the night of my first kiss was utterly unexpected.

I was with Marty, spending the night with our cousin Neil, who lived in the same apartment complex we had moved out of six years earlier. We played baseball with the neighborhood kids - up by the blue water tower that looked vaguely and entertainingly extraterrestrial � and the pitcher was an older boy Marty remembered from when we lived there, although I really didn�t recall him at all. His name was Bob (�spelled the same backwards� he joked) although everyone called him Ziggy and as we played he smiled at me, noticed me, like no boy ever had and it flustered me more than the sunlit heat. After the game he joined me and Marty and Neil in the yard at my aunt�s apartment and we talked and laughed into the night. He was 19, in the army, on leave � his faded Ft. Bliss boot camp t-shirt looked as if it read Ft. Buss, which Neil couldn�t stop laughing about � and he tickled me and stole little touches when he thought Marty and Neil weren�t looking. No one had ever wanted to touch me before and I was dizzy with euphoria, disbelief, and suspicion.

Finally Bob went to Marty and Neil and asked them to leave, saying to Marty, �I want to kiss your sister� and I couldn�t believe the words I heard, not even as he came back to me and placed his hand on my cheek and gently turned my head to kiss me. Astonishingly, it was everything I�d ever dreamed about, better than I�d imagined, and it seemed to have gone on forever, only to be interrupted by Marty and Neil�s return, punctuated by loud teenaged-boy teasing laughter. That summer, every time I spent the night at Neil�s I would hope to see Bob and when he came by we would sneak off in his mom�s minivan and kiss and his hands would wander up my blouse, down my pants, yet he never demanded anything from me, and it felt safe, and I finally had a moment where I forgot about what I learned in those books in my parents� bottom dresser drawer. But he soon went back to Ft. Bliss and Marty told my mother about our sneaking off and she asked me �why would you want to do that?� and his mockery and her disapproval kept my desires quiet and ashamed for two more years.

I met Brian when I was 18, after I had gone on a crash diet and a plan of compulsive and desperate exercise and finally won everyone�s notice and approval. I loved him almost immediately � his laughter, his tall wiry frame and his piercing blue eyes, the gap between his teeth - and he loved me back, I thought, because he told me he did and he gave me his class ring and told me he wanted to marry me someday. But he cried at our senior prom because they played �Wonderful Tonight� and it was Becky�s song and it brought back so many memories. Becky was his first girlfriend, who was 5�2� tall and weighed 90 pounds and couldn�t have looked less like me if she tried and ever since I have hated that name and hated that song. When we got to college and I didn�t have time to exercise two hours a day and ate normally again and gained all the weight back, he cried because why couldn�t he have a girlfriend small enough to sit on his lap like Becky used to. Astonishingly enough, I comforted him. His grief seemed so genuine to me that I never thought to question it.

He left me two years later for a girl who was the blonde spitting image of Becky, as all the while he still slept with me behind her back, behind the back of his next girlfriend, because I really hadn�t forgotten what I read in those bottom drawer books. I couldn�t be thin and petite and small enough to sit on his lap, I couldn�t inspire pride and desire in him, but I knew how to want it all the time, I knew how to want to please him, I knew the words and the sounds and the attitudes, and I knew how to come across as if pleasing him for fifteen minutes in his office on the sly was all I ever wanted. I tried to convince myself of that even as I cried every time I left him.

In between those few morsels of time and affection and lust he would casually throw my way - cast-offs really � I buried my sorrows alone in cartons of Ben and Jerry�s (after all, isn�t that what fat girls do?) and when at Marty�s dorm I lost myself in 40 ounce bottles of malt liquor, and grain alcohol mixed with Hawaiian punch, and huge pillowy billowing hits from our father�s handmade ceramic bong that Marty kept as an heirloom of sorts. I constantly longed and ached for love and instead I would wake up in strange beds with strange men, faceless, nameless, all while I good-naturedly went along with Marty�s jokes of �who wants to sleep with my sister?� After all, isn�t that what fat girls do? I came to one night to find one of my brother�s roommates thrusting into my mouth and when I burst into tears realizing that I didn�t know how it had started he at least had the decency to stop.

Yet I continued. I went down on everyone, I didn�t know how to stop, I didn�t know how not to do it. I did it for Brian because I loved him and he would twine my hair in his hands and cry out my name and it sounded beautiful in his mouth, distorted and elongated with his pleasure, and each time I took another strange man in my mouth I just wanted to hear my name, feel fingers in my hair and pretend I was beautiful for those five minutes.

I was 23 and living in New York and still seeing Brian - it was down to a few times a year at that point � until one night he called me and cried, again. He cried because he loved his girlfriend so much and wanted to marry her but �she doesn�t give me blowjobs like you do� and would I teach her how to do it the right way? Three years worth of rage didn�t come to the surface until I�d fumbled off the phone, stunned and numb, to write him a letter telling him that I never wanted to hear from him again, that I would not be degraded and treated that way again, that we were finished.

In my mind, with the distance of time, I like to make the neat connection that my life took an upswing after that letter. That I gradually stopped drinking so much, that I didn�t sleep with any man who said one kind word to me in passing, and while the connection isn�t as clean-cut as my brain likes to edit, it did work out something like that. I made new friends, I started to feel popular and interesting and fun, I went out after work � while I still read on the subway and while I brushed my teeth and went to the library three times a week, I also went to movies and to dinner parties and didn�t hide and might have had sex two or three times in next two years. I complained about my celibacy, but some part of me secretly relished it � the peace and the retreat from playacting the same tired script.

It was a party I was leaving when I met Louis, three years after finally cutting it off with Brian, and this time I thought I did it right. We went on dates and talked on the phone and didn�t sleep together until our third date and that night when I went to take him in my mouth � reflexively, almost � he gently pulled me away so he could kiss me some more. I spent months in bliss and in love and then I spent years trying to recapture that feeling while he alternated between rages that terrified me and stony coldness that hurt even more. When he finally started hitting me it only gave physical form to the hatred and contempt that he had been cultivating for me; it was so gradual that it took being beaten for me to truly see it.

Today I am single again, five months after leaving Louis, and in some ways I feel like I�m back at start again, longing and aching for someone to love me and feeling forever wanting, only this time I can add terror to the mix. I still wake up to find my heart racing after dreaming of him, of not being able to get away from him, and sometimes I no longer feel like home is a haven from danger. Danger is no longer Ted Bundy or Son of Sam; rather, danger loved me and came into my home and insinuated himself into me forever and how can I ever feel safe again? Love seems like danger when I look at every man that ever loved me and see nothing but lies and cruelty.

Some days when I feel particularly melodramatic I feel cursed, marked as Other, Unlovable � that the universe or whatever vague higher power that I don�t really believe in has brought this upon me for the hubris of having dared to love and I cry myself to sleep convinced that I have been doomed to walk this earth alone and always wanting what I cannot have. On less melodramatic days, however, I allow myself an occasional glimmer of hope, the rare belief that it�s not too late, that I�m not doomed to forever play out the scripts that are all I�ve ever really known, that I can never change. I don�t really know how to begin. But maybe I can just start by reading different books.