Behind the Pages: Shannon Luders Manuel Reveals the Untold Inspirations Behind The One Who Loves You
There are a lot of life experiences Shannon and I don’t share. I don’t know what it is like to experience discrimination because of my race, and I have never been attracted to religious orthodoxy. But I do understand the feeling of disconnectedness that can come from growing up in a family where no one looks like you, the yearning and questioning that can fill in the place of a missing father, and the struggle for self-acceptance.
These universal threads were what I latched onto and kept me turning page after page — the familiar and the foreign pulling me in. It’s what I like most about reading memoirs; I can pick up a book about a life completely different from my own, and for a few hours, stand in someone else’s shoes. And if I’m lucky, and the book is engaging and immersive, as The One Who Loves You is, then I am left enlightened and inspired by the act of connecting my own experience with another’s, binding reader to author, human to human.
