Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

He was a man too busy to flush toilets.

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.