Taking Your Own Life Seriously

L.M. Montgomery’s fiction has greatly impacted my writing. I write my books in Finnish, and I read Montgomery’s books in Finnish when I was a child. Books you read at an early age have a special place in your brain and body: they become part of you and your subconscious. My debut novel was set between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the era I know best from Montgomery’s fiction and her life—so naturally, when I was trying to conjure the language of that time, my mind turned to Montgomery’s language.