Gabriel García Márquez (March 6, 1927–April 17, 2014) is one of the greatest authors of all time, and yet he had an unlikely path to greatness. His life-story is an emboldening antidote to the tyrannical myth that the crib is the crucible of creative genius, that only those who turn their childhood dreams into reality are destined for cultural significance, and that unless you have clarity about your purpose early in childhood, you’re doomed to a life of floundering and mediocrity.

García Márquez had no such precocious clarity. (For that matter, neither did Van Gogh.) Instead, the celebrated author’s life stands as a heartening testament to the fact that a purpose is not something you are born with but something you find and cultivate, something that reveals itself when you let your life speak — even when what your life has to say is not, at first, what you want to hear.

García Márquez grew up wanting to be a musician. “I had dreamed about the good life, going from fair to fair and singing with an accordion and a good voice, which always seemed to me to be the oldest and happiest way to tell a story,” he writes in his magnificent memoir, Living to Tell the Tale (public library), before recounting the unlikely beginnings of his career as a writer:

I did not have the courage and sense of independence of my brother Luis Enrique, who did only what he wanted to do. And who without a doubt would achieve a happiness that is not what one desires for one’s children but is what allows them to survive the immoderate affections, the irrational fears, and the joyful expectations of their parents.

The expectations of his parents were lofty. As a young boy, Gabo had always been an excellent student, a genial and unproblematic child — so much so that his grandmother, who was instrumental in raising him, frequently commended him for being “the perfect kid.” But now he was struggling through his secondary education, unhappy in a school that had a “bad reputation as a laboratory of political perversion.” Dejected, he started hanging out with questionable friends, abusing alcohol, and staying out well into the night — he had veered, as he aptly puts it, toward “the wrong path.”

His parents were understandably perturbed at the sudden change. García Márquez relays a pivotal conversation he had with his mother at the age of eighteen:

“Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said after a lethal silence, “because if we tell all this to your father he’ll die a sudden death. Don’t you realize you’re the pride of the family?” For them it was simple: since there was no possibility I would be the eminent physician my father could not be because he did not have the money, they dreamed I would at least be a professional in something else. “Well, I won’t be anything at all,” I concluded. “I refuse to let you force me into being what I don’t want to be or what you would like me to be, much less what the government wants me to be.”

These tense conversations recurred over the remainder of the week, until one day his mother, “as if by chance,” suggested something that profoundly surprised him:

“They say that if you put your mind to it you could be a good writer.” I had never heard anything like it in the family. Since I was a child my inclinations had allowed me to suppose that I would draw, be a musician, sing in church, or even be a Sunday poet. I had discovered in myself a tendency, known to everyone, toward writing that was rather convoluted and ethereal, but this time my reaction was one of surprise.

Although his reply was one of cynical skepticism, in it — since cynicism is simply hope masked with fear — has the kernel of aspiration that would define his life:

“If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones, and they don’t make them anymore,” I told my mother. “After all, there are better ways to starve to death.”

But once the veil of youthful cynicism was lifted, García Márquez saw he had no choice but to make himself “one of the great ones.” Four decades later, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts”.

Complement Living to Tell the Tale with celebrated writers’ collected wisdom on writing and this Literary Jukebox celebration of García Márquez.