Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“I got out of bed / on two strong legs. / It might have been / otherwise. I ate / cereal, sweet / milk, ripe, flawless / peach. It might / have been otherwise.”

sisters. That our father was hers—not mine. My psychoanalyst half sister was expressing a very deep and perhaps not wholly conscious wish: she would have preferred that I had not been born.

since my wandering had commenced. After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: “You can say, ‘This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.”

As I would discover in the coming months, I was capable of functioning as if on one side of a split screen.

The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

sequelae