Excerpt from The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors by Laura Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I remember when I first read Barbara Smith's essay on why Toni Morrison's Sula was a lesbian novel, how this great grinding noise went through my brain. Of course, I thought, and so was Carson McCuller's Member of the Wedding and My Ántonia by Willa Cather. I always knew that. In that moment my whole imagination shifted, and I admitted what had always been so: I had spent my adolescence re-interpreting the reality of every book, movie, and television show I had ever experienced—moving everything into lesbian land. Of course, that was how I had kept myself semi-sane and developed an idea of how to love someone, how to be part of a community, and maybe even find happiness.

I read Mary Renault as lesbian—even her novels that featured only men. There was her novel about two women on a houseboat, with the one of them writing westerns to support them both, The Friendly Young Ladies, which was definitely about lesbians, but all Renault's work seemed to me to carry forward the same themes. (I discovered that every woman I have ever dated had read not only The Persian Boy but Fire from Heaven, and recognized them as lesbian texts—as if Alexander the Great was really, truly just another wounded butch underneath it all.) I read books for the queer subtext and because they advocated a world I understood. Books about outsiders, books about inappropriate desire, books where the heroes escaped or fought social expectations, books where boys were girlish or girls were strong and mouthy—all were deeply dykey to me, sources of inspiration or social criticism or life-sustaining poetry.

Flannery O'Connor—that astonishing, brave, visionary who told hard truths in a human voice—was an outsider holding a whole society up to a polished mirror. She was as ruthless as one of her own characters, and I loved her with my whole heart. Surely, she was a lesbian, I told myself and took comfort from her stubborn misfit's life, the fact that she lived with her mama and never married. I did not need her to sleep with a woman to prove her importance to me, though I would have been grateful to think of her with a great love comforting her as lupus robbed her of all she might have done.

If I set aside Flannery O'Connor, I would have to say that science fiction made me who I am today. I spent my childhood buried in those books. Every science fiction novel I fell into as a child, regardless of the gender or sexual persuasion of the author, widened my imagination about what was possible for me in the world. There were those perfectly horrible/wonderful stories about barbarian swordswomen who were always falling in love with demons, and there were the Telzey stories and the Witch World books and countless brave and wonderful novels told from inside the imaginations of "special" young girls. Mindreading seemed to me to code queer. Alien suggested dyke. On another world, in a strange time and place, all categories were reshuffled and made over.

These days with everyone so matter-of-fact about sexual identity it is hard to explain how embattled I was as a girl, how embattled the whole subject seemed to be. It was entirely different for women ten years younger than me if they grew up in an urban center, and different again a decade later for everyone regardless of where they grew up. I wonder what it must be like for those lesbians younger than me who have never had to make that translation. How do they read books, watch movies and television, and shape their own sense of being queer in the world today? Sometimes I wonder if books are as lifesaving for teenagers today as they were for me when I was a girl. But then I go to speak to some group and there are those young people clutching books to their hearts, asking me what I am reading with the same kind of desperate passion I felt whenever I went to a library or bookstore. No doubt it is different these days, but that passion still seems to be there. Books are still where some of us get our notions of how the world is, and how it might be.

Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Viking Penguin. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.