I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

I saw a pattern forming, like a series of skipping stones that sent ripples through the generations: all the granddaughters and grandmothers who loved each other, all the mothers left stranded in between.

The things my mother did not see about herself, I did not see, either.

The past shaped the present, but the present also reshaped the past.

According to neuroscientists, when we stir up a long-term memory, it floats in our consciousness, unstable, for a window of approximately three hours. During this time, the memory is malleable. The present infiltrates the past. We add details to fill in the gaps. Then the brain re-encodes the memory as if it were new, writing over the old one. As it sinks back down into the depths of our minds, we are not even aware of what we have gained or lost, or why.

She could set the universe aflame, but she used herself as fuel. Somewhere inside, the earth was scorched.

Having a writer in the family is like having a murderer in the family.

I saw all the ways in which she worked to be a very different mother from her own. And I also saw how much the past, so long kept secret, pulled us into formations like a deep ocean current, from so far below that we barely knew we were not moving on our own.

Oh Nadja!" my mother said. 'You're still stuck in your black-and-white phase of good and evil. The world is more complicated than that.

But I suppose that’s what old age is

My mother had told me once that her life felt like literature to her. It was filled with resonances and symbolism. I had always felt similarly

I have always felt at my safest around anger directed at someone not present.

I wanted to freeze time so I could keep a baby version of you in my pocket. I remember a conversation I had with my father. He told me to be excited. He said there was a whole new phase to enter when you begin discovering your children as people.

I’m saying that there is no objective reality

The café was a place that would come to mark a time in her life. She loved the pinball machines and the demi panachés. She loved the casual hours spent around others almost as painlessly as if she were alone.

It would take me years to realize that not everyone had nightmares about bombs and planes.

I found no power or pleasure in my changing body

Some things were said so often that they became true.

My mother wasn’t perfect. My mother was intense. Things didn’t happen because they were possible

I did not want to accept the random disorder of a world without narrative. That is what magic was for me: meaning superimposed on chaos.

I was unhappy there in the way presumptuous young people often are in their first jobs. I believed I could see all of the company’s dysfunction and the solutions to it. Yet, despite my extraordinarily clear memos, my superiors refused to let me overhaul the organization.

My father’s graphic novel Maus about his parents’ experiences in the concentration camps, won a Pulitzer Prize when I was five.

We knew, my brother and I, that it was only fear that led to danger. My mother cast around us her conviction that we would always be safe, and it held us like a force field.