I have and have had many names. Little Dog was what Lan called me. What made a woman who named herself and her daughter after flowers call her grandson a dog? A woman who watches out for her own, that’s who. As you know, in the village where Lan grew up, a child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard—little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child. To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.

Her own grandparents had fled Munich in the 1930s, but the rest of the family had stayed, and though it wasn’t the same, she knew the pain of fault lines in family history that you could not see across. Then, as Marie grew older and her interests broadened, Mrs. Adelman had loved following her mind, feeding this girl whose appetite to know was omnivorous and insatiable. Notes of a Native Son. Biographies of Gandhi and Grace Lee Boggs. Books on ecology, on tarot, on space exploration and climate change.

One of the overtly under-told stories of the Cape of Good Hope is that of descendants of manumitted slaves who despite their roots also participated in slavery. Simon van der Stel himself came into the world from the womb of a women with a history of enslavement. Van der Stel’s mother was Marie Lievens, a daughter of Monyca da Costa from the Coromandel Coast of South India and Heyndrick Levensz, a Dutch captain in Batavia. Da Costa is associated with a group of enslaved women who were bought by the VOC in South India.

She had not yet arrived at her name, which is to say that she had not grown enough to be given a name since names came from how your soul manifested, and that couldn’t be known until it was time to transition from girl to whatever it was you chose to be after. But everyone had to begin there: girl. Girl was the alpha. Even in the womb, the healers had said, the start was there before anything might change. Circles came before lines; that was what had to be honored. When the babies arrived, they were girls irrespective of whatever peace blossomed between the legs. Girls until after the ceremony where you could then choose: woman, man, free, or all.

I shiver when reading about a mother full of wrathful and possessive love. The thought that not all mothers are like that more and more is becoming a solace to me. There was Chen Duansheng’s mother, who raised her two daughters as poets at a time when education was considered damaging to feminine virtue. It was reassuring to see that John McGahern was buried next to his mother. When I met a friend’s parents, despite my theoretical understanding, it was extraordinary to see them interact with natural closeness. The fact that I had found it extraordinary made me cry afterward.

But one cannot have a different biography. One cannot find consolation in revision. One cannot relive age twelve to unread Turgenev. On the phone my father suggested, with a quantum physicist’s mystic illogic and a fatalist’s pure logic, that our difficulties be put into a new light. Who knows what we did in our past lives to others, he said; what we have is what we deserve.