Come awake, Tom. Fathers can willfully hurt their children. They can be addicts too weak to give up their vices, no matter the pain it causes. Mothers can turn you invisible with neglect. They can erase you with a denial, a refusal to see. Friends can deceive you. People lie. It is a cold, hard world. I do not blame Nell Hawkins for retreating from it into a madness of her own choosing.

On the Bowery, in the ornate carcass of a formerly grand vaudeville theater, a dance marathon limps along. The contestants, young girls and their fellas, hold one another up, determined to make their mark, to bite back at the dreams sold to them in newspaper advertisements and on the radio. They have sores on their feet but stars in their eyes.

Instead, I try to adjust to the dawn, letting the tears fall where they may, because it is morning; it is morning and there is so much to see.

I am a jumble of passions, misgivings, and wants. It seems that I am always in a state of wishing and rarely in a state of contentment.

But aren't many gardens beautiful because they are imperfect?...aren't the strange, new flowers that arise by mistake or misadventure as pleasing as the well-tended and planned?

Books are, at their heart, dangerous. Yes, dangerous. Because they challenge us: our prejudices, our blind spots. They open us to new ideas, new ways of seeing. They make us hurt in all the right ways. They can push down the barricades of ‘them’ & widen the circle of ‘us.

Everyone seems to want more form me. I am a thoroughly disappointing girl around. I shall wear a scarlet 'D' upon my bosom for all to see so that they will know not to raise their expectations.