In biology, however, there is a concept called homeostasis, an old idea with a newish name. It identifies the dynamic adjustments the living body makes to internal and external realities that keep it going as itself. It changes so it can remain the same.

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.

My loss also includes a sense of bewilderment that I have never felt before after someone I love has died. It has been hard to understand how it is possible that my mother is nowhere. How can she be nowhere?

Motherhood has been and is drowned in so much sentimental nonsense with so many punitive rules for how to act and feel that it remains a cultural straitjacket, even today. The metaphor is highly conscious. The straitjacket used to restrain psychiatric patients is an apt image for what Rich meant by keeping women under male institutional control.

Both the novel and the Internet are purveyors of many kinds of fiction. If one takes fiction seriously, and I do, what one reads is important. We are not only what we eat; we are what we read. Reading becomes part of memory and imagination.

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

“Don’t do anything you don’t really want to do,” she told me. The sentence passed through me like a bolt of electricity.

“In the same river we both step and do not step, we are and are not.” This is far more mysterious. The river continues to flow, to move, and the water in it is forever changing although it remains the same river. I will not attempt to interpret the “we are and are not.”