“[I'd] spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother's front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for somebody to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I'd married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature."

-- The Art of Memoir

​