When Alice Found Me | A Chronicle of Literary Awakening

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An illustration by John Tenniel from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Photo: Courtesy of Retroimages/Getty Images

Growing up in the early 1990s, I wasn’t the kind of kid who read Machado de Assis or memorized Shakespeare’s sonnets. I attended a public school in a city far from the capital, where education was precarious and basic. Until I was old enough to walk to the city library on my own, I was more the type who spent most days with chocolate-stained fingers on brand-new comic books. Every Sunday I got a new comic book, and Sunday, for me, was sacred.

My first memory of reading isn’t really reading. It’s my mother’s shoulder against my cheek as her voice carried me through worlds. In those twilight moments between waking and dreaming, bedtime stories weren’t just stories; they formed a dialogue of imagination shared between us.

I was ten when I first found Alice—or rather, when Alice found me. Alice in Wonderland captivated me deeply, right away. I saw lessons on every page. I had no idea back then that this book would become woven into the narrative of my own life. I couldn’t have predicted that years later, I would name my daughter Alice, or that my dog ​​Mabel would be named after a character whose existence in the book is little more than a footnote. That’s what books do when they find us at just the right time: they become part of our stories.

What’s wonderful and terrifying about Alice in Wonderland is that it’s fundamentally about being lost—about falling into a world that operates on rules you don’t understand. Isn’t that what growing up feels like? We’re all Alices, trying to navigate meaningless situations while trying to figure out what we’re doing.

Books, I realized a little too late, are not just stories; they’re portals. They are bridges between who we are and who we can be. They are maps to undiscovered inner territories. Alice taught me that being lost is not a state of failure but of infinite potential. Every unanswered question is an invitation to adventure.

Over the years, I’ve returned to Wonderland many times, tracing Alice’s steps as if they were my own. That’s the magic of stories: they grow with us, reflecting our fears, our hopes, and evolving selves.

Now, as I watch my own Alice turn the pages of her picture books, I wonder which stories will find her, shape her, become part of her own Wonderland. I hope she, too, discovers that books are more than words on a page. 

Maybe that’s why we always return to the books that first found us. Not just for nostalgia, but to remind ourselves of who we were when we first read them and all the versions of ourselves we have yet to become.

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