While I was writing the book, I went to see Louise Brooks's most famous film, Pandora's Box, at the Tivoli in Kansas City, and it was a lovely experience. You can watch old silent films on DVD or even on YouTube, but it was a different feeling watching her up on the big screen, seeing the film the way people saw it all those years ago.

Maybe children just want whatever it is they don't get. And then they grow up and give their children what they wanted, be it silence or information, affection or independence--so that child, in turn, craves something else. With every generation the pendulum swings from opposite to opposite, stillness and peace so elusive.

Yes, Louise Brooks was beautiful and intelligent, and she could be very funny, but obviously there was a deep insecurity there, a real destructive rage and immaturity.

I wasn't that familiar with silent films. I didn't know, for example, how hugely popular silent films were in the 1920s, how people would go to the movies several times a week.

I am supposed to be where I go.

The thing that got me about the Orphan Trains was that the experiences were so varied. Some of the kids went from neglect and hunger in New York to loving farm families who couldn't wait to fatten them up, who gave them medical care, an education, affection. And some of the kids became the victims of terrible cruelty, and more hunger, and more neglect - it all depended on who adopted them off of the train.

You could push people away, past their limits, even accidentally, and then it was just too late to get them back