My son is now fourteen, and from the moment he was born, I understood that forevermore my heart would be walking around outside my body.

In my life as a wife and mother, I'm always conscious of my desire to be present.

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory—childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age—are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results.

I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.

It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way.

My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.

Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories