It was 1981; I was 10 and friendless. To be fair, I longed to hang out with my peers, to laugh with instead of being laughed at. Instead, I hung out where I felt most comfortable — the school library.

I became a secret book collector while reading about lives I’d never live. 

Victor Frankl survived the unspeakable in Nazi concentration camps. What he learned through that process resonates with countless other serving life sentences in California.