It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
Much more than memoir; it's history.
Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.