I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.

The irreversibility of time. That's the hardest thing to accept at our age, that's the most violent aspect of death.

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.

I write because in the act of creation there comes that mysterious, abundant sense of being both parent and child; I am giving birth to an Other and simultaneously being reborn as a child in the playground of creation.

Mine [parents] started out more from scratch, because I'm constantly aware of what they suffered in the war.