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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

THE MILLENNIUM INCLINATOR, a plaque on the wall said. Funny name for a funicular. It began its ascent. I was going to say inexorable ascent, but of course it would stop when it got to the top. It was just very slow. I was a middle-aged woman with uncombed hair in a glass box; I decided to pretend that it and I were a performance piece.

(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.)

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.