The Hero of This Book

Like any nameless narrator, I’ve just declined to introduce myself. I apologize if you hate such narrators and such novels. We have this in common. I hate novels with unnamed narrators. I didn’t mean to write one. Write enough books and these things will happen. I never meant to write a novel about a writer, either. I vowed not to. Writers are dull

Any writer will be asked, Why? Why write; why write this book; what made you do it. If I showed you a photograph of my parents, I think you’d understand.

My mother distrusted memoirs and I wasn’t interested in the autobiographical and for a long time that made things easy.

That morning he’d given me a long history of Clerkenwell, punctuated by restaurant recommendations; I hadn’t paid attention. Lenin and Stalin had met in a nearby pub,

I brought her, cradled in my arms, the three waffle irons I’d uncovered on the kitchen counter. “Three,” I told her, as though they were a litter. “Yes,” said my mother. “Which one do you want to keep?” “All of them.” I don’t think my mother formally collected waffle irons (though later I would find an antique one beneath her bed), and at the momen

My parents were a sight gag. Opposites otherwise, too. One shy but given to monologues, one outgoing and inclined to listen. One with a temper; one affable, sometimes enragingly so. Opposite in every way but their bad habits, which is the secret to a happy marriage and also the makings of a catastrophe.

Never give up your metaphoric bad habits, the way your obsessions make themselves visible in your words. Tell yourself that one day a scholar will write a paper on them, an x-ray of your psyche, with all of your quirks visible like breaks in bones, both healed and fresh.

(At antique stores, my father bought Victoriana. My mother liked things from her own childhood: the breadboard with a picture of Uncle Sam captioned It’s Patriotic to Slice Your Own; a statue of FDR as boat captain, hands on a ship’s wheel that was also a clock.)

Grief, as I understood it—grief and I were acquainted—is the kind of loss that sets you on fire as you struggle to put it out.