Esther Ehrlich is the author of Nest, her debut novel published by Wendy Lamb Books/Random House in September 2014. Ehrlich was born and raised in Boston, graduated from Vassar College, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

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I’m the youngest of four children, all of us very close in age. In the neighborhood we grew up in, kids played four-square in the street, tag in the nearby field, and ice-skated at Crystal Lake in winter. The one rule that I remember? Be home by dinner. When life felt rough, school was a comfort. So were my best friends, two rabbits who lived in a hutch in our backyard. I spent as much time with them as I could and tried my hardest to teach them to come, sit, and stay. And books. I especially loved the sad but ultimately hopeful ones where kids took matters into their own hands and made things happen.

What else?

In my Jewish family, everybody talked at once and interrupting wasn’t considered interrupting and it was perfectly normal, expected even, to ask a ton of questions and answer a question with another question.

For a few weeks each summer, I ran wild on Cape Cod, tromping around the dunes, swimming across ponds, sleeping in a tent or throwing a sleeping bag down on the thick mat of bearberry and watching the stars until I drifted off to sleep.

My experience in math class, early on, wasn’t good. The class was set up to be competitive and it made numbers feel intimidating—rigid and harsh. Words, by contrast, felt wonderfully flexible, full of possibility, of light.

And so many years later, they still do. It feels like an amazing gift to spend my time choosing words to shape into sentences to create stories that I can share with others.