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Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, and the essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. Forna’s essays have appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Observer and Vogue. She has written stories for BBC radio and written and presented television documentaries including “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC Television, 2009) and “Girl Rising” (CNN, 2013). Forna is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy. She has acted as judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Bailey Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the International Man Booker Prize. In 2003, Forna established the Rogbonko Project to build a school in a village in Sierra Leone. The charity has also run a number of projects in the spheres of adult education, sanitation and maternal health.

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Looking around the New England Reptile Expo, I decided I wasn’t one of these people.

Older men examined crickets, kids clutched Tupperwares of geckos, but the crowd seemed mostly twenty-to-forty-year-olds trapped in a mall-Goth-teenager phase. Baggy black pants. Dark dyed hair. Clothing from Hot Topic. Tattoos of reptiles. Live snakes around arms. Piercings. Lizards on shoulders. Pasty skin. Glazed eyes.

“I bet most of these people listen to Marilyn Manson,” my boyfriend, Richie, whispered.

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