I envy people whose parents died when they were young, that’s easier to remember they stay unchanged. I was sure mine would anyway….I thought of them as living in some other time, going about their own concerns closed safe behind a wall as translucent as jello, mammoths, frozen in a glacier.

Leaving my child, that was the unpardonable sin; it was no use trying to explain to them why it wasn’t really mine.

A divorce is like an amputation; you survive but there’s less of you.

He said he loved me, the magic word, it was supposed to make everything light up, I’ll never trust that word again.

She talked to me then, or not to me exactly but to an invisible microphone suspended above her head: people’s voices go radio when they give advice. She said you just had to make an emotional...