The novelist on Virginia Woolf’s luminous prose, obsessively rereading James Baldwin and why Saint Augustine is his favourite writer

My earliest reading memory
The earliest book I remember reading and loving was Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. A boy imagines himself into an adventure, gets into trouble, imagines a way home. It bears rereading still: it’s the very best parable of the creative life I know.

My favourite book growing up
I read voraciously and indiscriminately as a kid, so much so that I’m not sure I really had favourites. I loved the Judy Blume books I stole from my older siblings’ bookshelves and the darker novels of Cynthia Voigt. Two series by the fantasy writer Mercedes Lackey left a mark: Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, Magic’s Price, maybe the first books I read that featured a gay protagonist; and the Diana Tregarde mysteries, a noir series featuring a hardboiled witch. Catnip for 13-year-old me.