The Hero of This Book

Bereaved. That I’d own up to. Bereaved suggests the shadow of the missing one, while grief insists you’re all alone. In London, I was bereaved and haunted.

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,

She was terrible with money and pinched pennies to convince herself that she wasn’t. My mother hated being bad at anything that involved reason.

Maybe the mayor would call me up. When I was a kid, the mayor was an exuberant man who, like my mother, was Jewish and dusky, who favored pale suits, and even now when I hear of a generic mayor it’s him that I see. Kid, he’d say. How could you have let this happen? How could you have allowed your elderly parents to live in this shithole? What choic

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

I believed the afterlife was, as an atheist might tell a child curious about heaven, the memories of other people. How my mother would have hated that! To cede control to other people’s brains, when her own brain was what she trusted. Still, she loved being thought about.

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.

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