It is good to be a child wanted by her mother. The simple fact that every person begins inside another person haunts motherhood. The simple fact that most women push the infant out of their bodies haunts motherhood. The fact that many women feed their children from the milk in their breasts haunts motherhood. Without a female reproductive system

there is a detached quality to the eulogy, as if he is surveying his childhood from a great distance, and his link to the woman who bore and suckled and cared for him is missing.

that is how the city was born: necropolis before metropolis.

When we returned home on the bus every day after long hours of reading and arithmetic and sometimes tense, confusing dramas with other children, we each sat on a stool in the kitchen, ate the cookie or cake our mother had baked for us, and told her what was new. She laid out our clothes for school, put towels in the dryer so they would be warm when

secrets traveled in the family, secrets heavy with emotion. I felt they were like stones stored in hidden pockets in a big man’s overcoat, and wearing that coat meant being weighed down by shame.

In his memoir, my father remembers that when he met his father, the man was wearing his wedding ring and that it made him happy. Nowhere else in the memoir is there any description of bitterness and alienation between his parents. There is no other mention of wedding rings on or off, or the pain of a naked finger as opposed to one wearing the sign

My mother was proud, vain, and competitive. Despite evidence to the contrary, she claimed she never had fevers, detected spots on her clothing no one else could see, and kicked higher and harder than anyone else in her exercise classes. She spent long hours writing deep papers for a book club to which she belonged. She wanted those papers to shine,

A few minutes after I had walked into the house, my mother looked at me and said, “I want you to see it.” She removed her blouse and bra and showed me the long scar where her breast used to be. Her forthright display of the healed but ugly wound had a powerful effect on me. Bodily mutilation is no small thing. I can still see her standing opposite

She bounced back—not just from a short jail sentence, but from hardships of all kinds, and many illnesses. In psychiatry, resilience is a term with a clinical meaning used to describe a person’s ability to cope with stress and trauma. This capacity involves multiple factors—the chorus of a person’s bodily systems and how they respond to stress;