The Antiguan-US writer on her quarrels with the Bible, the joy of a good plant catalogue – and how reading Elizabeth Bishop transformed her life
My earliest reading memory
My mother taught me to read from a book she borrowed from the St Johns, Antigua public library. It was a biography of Louis Pasteur, I suppose to make me understand something about him. She told me the milk I drank was boiled, and the whole process was because of him. I must have been three then; by the time I was three and a half, I could read anything.
My favourite book growing up
I didn’t have lots of books growing up. But the one I liked most was the King James version of the Bible. I read it from beginning to end and had so many quarrels with it. That story of the prophet who was going up to heaven in a Chariot of Fire was pretty amazing, but then when his bereft servant, having witnessed this terrifying event, was returning home, some children made fun of him and called him a bald-headed man. He was so offended that he summoned a bear to eat them up. Of course, I would have been one of those children.And don’t get me started on the New Testament, that celebrity magazine. For my seventh birthday, my mother gave me a concise Oxford English Dictionary. I read it all the way through, from A to Z.
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