Five Bird Houses

 

When he was thirteen, Gabriel García Márquez walked up to the prettiest girl on the dance floor and said, “I just realized all my poems are about you. Marry me.” Most girls would have laughed and walked away, but Mercedes said, “Alright. But I have to finish school first.” They married thirteen years later. Gabriel’s dream was to write an epic novel. He shut himself in a room and wrote while Mercedes dealt with the real world. After 18 months, Gabriel’s enormous manuscript was ready to ship to a publisher. The only problem: there was no money for postage. Mercedes pawned the last two things she owned – a hairdryer and a blender – and the rest is history. That manuscript became One Hundred Years of Solitude; one of the most influential novels of the 20th century. After it came Love in the Time of Cholera, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. And a Nobel Prize for Literature.