Age About 30, I Stopped

It Turned Out To Be Impossible For Me To 'run Away' In The Sense Other American Teenagers Did. Any Movement At All Was Taken For Progress In My Family.

I Kept The Fingers Of My Left Hand Crossed All The Time, While On My Right-hand Fingers I Counted Anything At All—steps To The Refrigerator, Seconds On The Clock, Words In A Sentence—to Keep My Head Occupied. The Counting Felt Like Something To Hang On To, As If Finding The Right Numbers Might Somehow Crack The Code On Whatever System Ran The Slippery Universe We Were Moving Through.

Be Willing To Be A Child And Be The Lilliputian In The World Of Gulliver.

Even The Best Of Us Are At Least Part-time Bastards.

The Emotional Stakes A Memoirist Bets With Could Not Be Higher, And It's Physically Enervating. I Nap On A Daily Basis Like A Cross-country Trucker.