'I did not grow up in poverty, but I did grow up with a poor boys sense of longing, in my case not for what my family never had, but what we had had, and lost. Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way the homeless hold on to lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addictions; unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic and suicide. In this Jim [my boss] and I were similar: he had grown up outside the candy store and I had grown up on the threshold as the door was being shut.'.
Page 81 of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist', by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.
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