I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.

Fuentes frames family cohesion as “good fortune,” implying it is not merely earned but also contingent—an accident of circumstance that can profoundly shape a life. The emphasis on a “happy, closely knit” household suggests emotional security and solidarity as formative resources, especially for someone who later became a cosmopolitan writer attentive to questions of identity, belonging, and cultural inheritance. Read this way, the line functions as a modest acknowledgment of privilege: stable intimacy at home can enable intellectual risk-taking and resilience in public life. It also quietly counters romantic myths of the artist as necessarily forged by familial rupture, presenting warmth and unity as equally generative origins.