Min had grown up thinking she was born into a role as a flawless daughter, and someday she would become a flawless daughter-in-law, wife, and mother.
When Welch, a Berkeley native who grew up "thinking I was born an atheist the way some people are born Italian," moved to Virginia for graduate school, she was forced to confront her inherent fear of Evangelicals.
And that was the exciting thing, that for a long time I'd been thinking I was born in the wrong century, and then I realized that it wasn't about this jungle or that river; it was about unresolved history and how history continues to inform the present.
I kept thinking, "I was born, I'm here right now, and I'm going to die someday.
"And that's really fucking overwhelming...What was he thinking?!" When Grace** was born, her mother was almost 50, and was often mistaken for her grandmother.
"Because I spent my childhood thinking that I was born too late, that I had missed all this fabulous life before the war, the ocean liners, the Orient Express".
She even manages to be fired from a book-shelving job at Cambridge City Library, simply, it seems, for being quite hopelessly dreamy – despite her own wishful thinking that she was "born to librarianship".
His close friend Andrew Motion remarks: 'I sometimes ask him, "What have you been doing today?" and he says, "thinking".' Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1954 and grew up around Cirencester, where his parents - his father was a bank manager, and he was their only child - encouraged his enthusiasm for listening to music.
"It isn't that I was born thinking I had to be president," she said, leaning in and talking softer than she does on television or at Tea Party rallies.
