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One of the first books I remember reading as a child was Pinkalicious. I remember being interested in this book because of Pinkalicious's imaginary friend Goldie the unicorn; I even had a stuffed animal of Goldie when I was younger.

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"I cried because I was so beautiful."

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In second grade, I started to push myself towards chapter books with the Nancy Drew series. My mom had a rather large collection of that series as well as the Bobbsey Twins, which helped me with my vocabulary and taught me more about the past.

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Nancy Drew and The Mystery of the Ivory Charm

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Nancy Drew and The Mystery of the Ivory Charm

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"By nature Nancy was courageous and resourceful. Left motherless at an early age, she had developed an amazing ability to fight her own battles in the world. Hannah Gruen, the family housekeeper, declared that her young mistress's love of mystery would surely prove her undoing in the end, but the girl had demonstrated more than once that she had a natural aptitude for detective work."

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In fourth grade, my parents decided it was a good time to introduce me to the world of Harry Potter. The books took me longer to read than any I had read before, since they were longer and more challenging, but I immediately fell in love with the magical world.

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"Harry's eyes narrowed as he focused on the spiders. If they pursued their fixed course, there would be no doubt about where they would end up. 'Looks like they're heading for the Forbidden Forest....' And Ron looked even unhappier about that."

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My favorite thing about reading is how diverse book topics tend to be. I can go to the library and find fiction or non fiction which open a door to a new world I didn't know existed, and teach me more about our world and what we can shape it into. Books are portals to new sets of knowledge and experiences, and there are enough out there so it is impossible to run out.

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Percy Jackson and The Olympians, The Lightning Thief.

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Percy Jackson and The Olympians, The Lightning Thief.

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"Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood. If you're reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life."

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This series remains my favorite out of all of Rick Riordan's literature. With a much more diversified set of characters than Percy Jackson, it teaches more about inclusiveness and tolerance in our modern world.

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"‘The thing about fate, Magnus: even if we can’t change the big picture, our choices can alter the details. That’s how we rebel against destiny, how we make our mark. What will you choose to do?’”

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I absolutely loved my novel for the BFAPN assignment. Circe provided a new perspective to a few classic myths for me, raising questions about the "greatness" of the deities and heroes so often celebrated. It also expressed inequality due to a patriarchal society, both in the past and now, reminding readers of how much improvement society has yet to make in order to achieve complete equality for all groups of people.

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"On the foundation of his knowledge civilization had been built. Prometheus’ words, deep-running as roots, had waited in me all this time. ‘We bear it the best we can.’"

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Circe, a Vilified Witch From Classical Mythology, Gets Her Own Epic

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Circe, a Vilified Witch From Classical Mythology, Gets Her Own Epic

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Profile

As Madeline Miller made her way through the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she kept "nerding out," as she sheepishly called it, over the relics. Credit... An Rong Xu for The New York Times

On a cold, sunny afternoon in March, the novelist Madeline Miller wandered through the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, swooning over ancient amphoras and ethereal statues of gods and goddesses.

She was eager to see a particular artifact - a 2,500-year-old wine vessel painted with a scene from Homer's Odyssey, as Odysseus confronts the goddess and sorceress Circe after she transforms his men into pigs.

Ms. Miller was riveted and horrified by that scene when she first read the Odyssey, and it became a pivotal moment in her new novel, "Circe," a bold and subversive retelling of the goddess's story that manages to be both epic and intimate in its scope, recasting the most infamous female figure from the Odyssey as a hero in her own right.

But on her way to see the vase, she kept getting distracted, dazzled by the mythical figures that have populated her imagination since she was a little girl, when her mother read passages to her from the Iliad and Odyssey at bedtime. More age-appropriate fare never grabbed her attention in the same way. "I wanted gods and monsters," she said.

The 2,500-year-old clay wine vessel that depicts the scene from Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus confronts the goddess and sorceress Circe after she transforms his men into pigs. Credit... Metropolitan Museum of Art

Visiting the museum felt like a homecoming of sorts. Growing up on the Upper East Side, she spent hours roaming the Met, marveling at the heroes, warriors and deities. Exploring those halls decades later, she was just as awe-struck.

"This is one of my favorites," she said, bounding toward a marble statue of a wounded Amazon warrior, noting that the figure would have once been brightly painted. "You can see the drops of blood on the side of her breast."

She spotted a terra-cotta plaque of Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, cautiously approaching his wife Penelope after he returns to Ithaca. "I love the emotion that's conveyed in just her posture," she said.

Tucked away in a dimly lit gallery was the Circe vase, which showed Odysseus pursuing Circe with his sword drawn as his pigheaded men trail helplessly behind him.

"Circe as a character is the embodiment of male anxiety about female power," Ms. Miller said, as she studied the vase, snapping photos with her phone. "Of course she has to be vanquished."

That scene infuriated Ms. Miller when she read the Odyssey on her own, at 13. It bothered her that one of the most powerful female figures in the epic was left kneeling and cowering before Odysseus, and then takes him to bed as a conciliatory gesture. "For the hero to succeed, the woman has to be put in her place, and that was always so disappointing," she said.

Years later, when she was majoring in classics at Brown University and read the Odyssey in the original Homeric Greek for the first time, Ms. Miller began to rethink Circe's story, which unfolds from Odysseus's perspective, as he describes his time on her island to the Phaeacians. She saw that Circe, far from being purely a villain or a vanquished witch, had a benevolent side and played a crucial role guiding Odysseus back to Ithaca.

Ms. Miller's fascination with Circe became an obsession after she published her 2011 debut novel, "The Song of Achilles," a retelling of the Iliad that centers on a romance between Achilles and his friend Patroclus.

She had planned to stay away from epics for a while, but kept thinking about the witch, alone on her island. Why did she transform men into animals? What happened to her after Odysseus and his crew sailed away, or in the centuries before they arrived? She decided Circe deserved her own epic.

"Epic has been so traditionally male," she said. "All these stories are composed by men, largely starring men, and I really wanted a female perspective."

Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Recycling classical myths is a well-worn literary trope; everyone from Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood and Rick Riordan have riffed on and remixed Greek and Roman stories. Ms. Miller, 39, who lives outside Philadelphia, is particularly well equipped to tackle Homer. She began studying Latin when she was 12, started on Greek a couple of years later, and seems to have near encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Western gods and goddesses.

"Circe" - a feminist reboot starring a goddess who has often been overlooked, or miscast as a vindictive seductress - has drawn praise both from classics scholars and novelists like Margaret George and Ann Patchett.

Emily Wilson, a classicist who recently published a new translation of the Odyssey, said she was skeptical at first of yet another "retelling of a classical myth," but was won over by Ms. Miller's take. "What she's doing is partly about gender, but it's also addressing a bigger question about power, and the abuse of power," she said.

In Ms. Miller's version, Circe's encounter with Odysseus is only a slice of her story, which unfolds over thousands of years and begins in the palace of her father, the sun god Helios. Her family members, who treat her with cruelty or indifference, become infamous in their own right: Her sister Pasiphae marries King Minos and gives birth to the Minotaur, a bullheaded, man-eating monster; while her brother Aeetes grows up to rule Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece, and fathers Medea, who later murders her children.

Circe's fortune changes when she discovers her power to transform. After she turns a nymph, Scylla, into a six-headed sea monster, Helios banishes Circe to a remote island where she spends centuries in exile, with wolves and lions as her companions.

Ms. Miller was intrigued by Homer's description of Circe as "speaking like a human," an odd detail that is never fully explained in the Odyssey. In her novel, Circe's deceptively soft voice produces grave consequences. When sailors wash up on her island, she welcomes them with wine and food, and they mistake her for a mortal. After a violent encounter with one sailor, she begins preemptively attacking them, turning them into pigs.

To flesh out Circe's story, Ms. Miller looked beyond the Odyssey and consulted a handful of ancient texts. She found scattered references to Circe across the ancient world, and drew from the plot of the Telegony, an epic preserved only in a short summary, which tells the story of Telegonus, Odysseus and Circe's son.

She plucked other details from the Argonautica, an epic poem about the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts, which describes how Circe performs a purification ritual for Jason and Medea.

"Epic has been so traditionally male," said Madeline Miller. "All these stories are composed by men, largely starring men, and I really wanted a female perspective." Credit... An Rong Xu for The New York Times

She wove some of the mythology into her narrative, and ignored other depictions that struck her as silly or sexist, deliberately omitting a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses where Circe punishes a king who spurns her advances by turning him into a woodpecker.

"That's one of the funny things about mythological realism, or whatever it is that I write," she said. "You have to write about six-headed monsters, but from a realistic perspective."

It's perhaps the same reason Ms. Miller loves the Greek and Roman antiquities at the Met, works of art that feel both timeless and transcendent, yet lifelike. As she made her way through the treasure-filled galleries, she kept "nerding out," as she sheepishly called it, over the relics. She paused to admire a marble figure of Aphrodite crouching in the bath and a headless statue of Hermes.

A look of excitement crossed her face as she rushed toward one of her favorite artifacts. "If you will indulge me, there's a chariot," she said, practically skipping off.

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Circe, a Vilified Witch From Classical Mythology, Gets Her Own Epic (Published 2018)

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Profile On a cold, sunny afternoon in March, the novelist Madeline Miller wandered through the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, swooning over ancient amphoras and ethereal statues of gods and goddesses.

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Another shift in my relationship with reading was when I read Frankenstein in AP Lit. Before, reading older literature had been a struggle and something I did not enjoy; however, in reading Frankenstein it clicked that I had to focus on the content and meaning of the words, not the older language. Putting any struggle aside, more messages jumped out to me than in past books, and the experience was enjoyable despite the grim plot.

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“It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outside substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”

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My greatest challenge in reading is engaging with certain texts. If I find a book too boring or just not something I particularly want to read, it gets a lot harder to find meaning past the surface level of the text. I try to keep an open mind when reading any literature, but some books are simply difficult to stay focused on, which hurts my understanding of the text and my motivation.

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My biggest goal for the future would be to read entirely the unabridged version of "The Count of Monte Cristo". I have a copy, and it is the size of a textbook (although it does have some pictures dispersed through the pages). The text is dense and packed onto each page, so just getting through a chapter takes hours. I also hope to read "The Song of Achilles" (by Madeline Miller) and to find more books on different cultural mythologies.

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I have noticed that the books you chose tend to take you just beyond what is merely human. From a golden unicorn through the precocious insight of preteen detectives across magical worlds of wizards and demigods back to a place where superior intellect creates its own downfall in the form of a monstrous power.

I am reminded of CS Lewis’s description of his attachment to fairy tales. “As an adult,” he said, “I got more out of them, because I brought more to them.”  And one of the things you are bringing to these stories is magnanimity.

You revel in the tales of the triumph of the good, but you struggle with the dark fears of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley when she faces her own immense creative power. As Peter Kreeft points out in a commentary on Jean Paul Sartre’s “Nausea”, it is better to face the truth, even if it is awful. It is also possible to face it and say “this worldview is needlessly pessimistic.”

And this specific response is what you have made. You have seen the divine spark in humanity, and you have found hope in it. You have found in these books a reflection of yourself, and Pinkalicious predicted your path:

“I cried because I was so beautiful.”

When you were still reading Pinkalicious, I faced a real challenge in life: I wrote a college letter of recommendation for a Slytherin named Mikayla. It had to be included. She was too deeply a Potter fan to leave it out. What I discovered was that her attraction to the wizarding seat of intolerance and prejudice wasn’t a sign of either intolerance nor prejudice. No, she just had no patience for people who could not find the  magic in the world. That made her a proponent of a pure-blood-only worldview.

You have found the magic in the world. You have seen humanity exceeding its apparent limits to go where only the poets and dreamers and writers of fantasy can take us. But you will bring the world in with you. Where Mikayla said “go or get out of the way,” you have said “I know the way, follow me.” Mikayla may build a haven for the hopeful, but Julianna will make it a solace for the hopeless. Mikayla could open the main gates for Rowling’s children, but Julianna will sneak in Shelley’s in through the back door.

“Even if Julianna can’t change the big picture, her choices will alter the details.” —Rick Riordan, probably, if only he knew. Julianna will do something great with it.

-Dad Fugère

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Please feel free to leave a comment here after viewing my autobiography!