history only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe.

I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.

I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.

A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.

When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.