Myers continued to struggle academically during his senior year, and was as unable as ever to explain the sources of his problems to the school. Nevertheless, he took some solace in English; Myers’s new teacher provided her students with customized reading lists to help them develop as writers, which encouraged Myers to “fully ma[ke] the connection between [his] reading and the writing process” (144). Since Myers hadn’t previously read in any sort of systematic way, encountering the different kinds of narratives his teacher assigned was an eye-opening experience; his teacher urged him to view each work as having something to offer, in spite of any weaknesses it might have.

On his teacher’s recommendation, Myers read Penguin Island, Buddenbrooks and Père Goriot. The idea of Balzac’s Goriot “toiling away just beyond the edges of a world he could not enter” was a particularly striking (and familiar) idea to Myers, and inspired him to model himself on Balzac at a time when his faith in his own voice was faltering; Myers had only a vague sense of the kind of stories he wanted to write (“stories with secret meanings that would relate to people like [him], no matter their color or position in life”), and he felt that his work was becoming “incomprehensible” (149, 148).