From the moment I found myself standing in front of a memoir-writing class with a hunk of manuscript in my hand, asking, What is this all about? —and the answer came back, It’s about this dysfunctional family in Cincinnati, and I said, No, no. What is it about?—I saw that my classes would be reading as I needed to read: looking for the inner context that makes a piece of writing larger than its immediate circumstance; places a writer’s thought and feeling; imposes shape and reveals inner purpose; the thing that is invariably being addressed when one says to any writer of imagination, But what is it about? and does not expect to hear, It’s about this family in Cincinnati.

Though I wouldn’t call any of this philosophy per se, this book does contain a certain amount of what might be dubbed life lessons. They might not amount to much, but they are personal lessons I’ve learned through actually putting my own body in motion, and thereby discovering that suffering is optional.

Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.

Each time I wrote more I’d ask myself, So— what’s on my mind right now?

I didn’t want to write too much about myself, but if I didn’t honestly talk about what needed to be said, writing this book would have been pointless. I needed to revisit the manuscript many times over a period of time; otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to explore these delicate layers.