I was a girl growing up in a Guatemala wracked by a bloody, undeclared civil war. I knew magic existed, because I knew books existed. And there was one I wanted desperately to read — Cien Años de Soledad — One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was on my mother's nightstand and on the lips of every adult in my life. I was seven. 

"Can I read it?" I asked my mother.

"No, you're not old enough," she responded.

I knew what that meant. It must have sex in it, and no amount of complaining would change her mind.

Three years later my mother's art agent from New York came down to Guatemala to visit. Her husband looked a lot like the actor Richard Benjamin and to tell you the truth, I had a bit of a crush on him. Not simply because of his looks — though they certainly didn't hurt — but because he spoke to me as if I was an adult. One Hundred Years of Solitude had recently been published in English and now even non-Latinos were thinking about the astonishing literature coming out of Latin America. The agent's husband grilled me about what I — bookishly precocious — was reading. I answered with the proto-Latin American Boom books of Argentine Ernesto Sábato and Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias. I also took the opportunity to complain about my mother's prohibition about One Hundred Years of Solitude. 

He looked at me, puzzled. "It is the most wonderful book," he said to me. "And you're plenty old enough to read it."

Ah. 

I found the book shelf my mother had tucked the frankly drab original paperback into, and performed the first of what would turn out to be many rebellions in my life. 

I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude. 

Magic. Politics. Bloody, operatic circumstance and family and times that, as young as I was, I knew I was living — even if my surname wasn't Buendía and my country wasn't Colombia. García Márquez was a journalist before he became a fiction writer and I, who have followed that same trajectory, understand perfectly why. Some truths can only be told in fiction; some reports rival the most vile and grotesque imaginings. 

Firing squads, children born with pig tails, steps ghosted by butterflies. Gabo gave us the words and images, and each of us wanted to claim a bit of the Macondo he recorded for us. 

When five years later we were forced to leave Guatemala by an escalating dirty war that would culminate in genocide, García Márquez had already given me the language to speak of magic and realism, and the notion to cross the borders he had shown me were porous between. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude again, this time translated into English, and tallied the translation mistakes. I noted them with the same fervor I noted my life's own translation mistakes, the ones over which I had no control as much as the ones over which I did.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

It is still one of the most memorable and gorgeous opening lines of all time. Someday I hope to write one even a quarter so truthfully magical.

Years and years after we had moved to the United States, I was having one of those conversations where my mother was claiming to have been an incredibly progressive Latina mother and I was dismissing and refuting every example she gave. I reminded her that she had prohibited me from reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and, hello, it didn't even have much sex in it.

"That's not why I didn't want you to read it," she said, surprised.

"Right," I answered. "If it hadn't been for Iris Friedlander's husband giving me 'permission' to read it, I might have missed out on what is one of my favorite books."

"Hmmm," she said, pursing her lips. "He gave you permission, did he? Presumptuous."

"I didn't want you to read it then," she added after a moment, "because you were so young. What do the young know about love? I wanted you to love it as much as I did." 

And we stood — she a middle-aged Guatemalan artist who had left her homeland and would perpetually feel in exile; I, on the brink of twenty, fighting with the rejection and embrace of different country than hers — and understood that somehow the same book, the same writer, had profoundly touched us both.

These days, I cannot think of García Márquez without thinking of my mother. Fourteen years ago at her memorial service I got up and told those gathered that the loved ones of artists are luckier than most — as long as the art is around so is the artist. 

Only, of course, it is true not only of the loved ones of artists but those of us who are marked and transformed by a work of art without ever having met its author. 

Gabo's work and his words. The words his own have prompted. This word. Full of gratitude.