You’re thirteen. You lean gently into your mother, stately in her good sheath dress and stockinged legs, your hands crossed in your lap like birds at rest, mouth slightly open in wonder. Your sisters, still in pajamas like it was Christmas morning: unto us a child is born, or will be. A baby, right now the size of her knuckle. Mother and daughters huddle on carpeted stairs, cozy as a scene from Little Women. But there is no baby: it’s a tumor instead. Your mother’s light goes dark, a burned-out bulb. No one talks about it. You study hard, hoping to bring that light back into her face.

You’re eighteen. You glower through the hole in the window you just put your fist through, sick of being the good girl you’re supposed to be, the one they think you are. Your grades are excellent, college locked in. You’ve sidestepped the pitfalls of drink, drugs, and boys—for now, ready to cut loose once you leave home. But your rage is a blast furnace. Why do babies turn out to be tumors? Why won’t anyone talk about anything important?

You’re twenty-three. Your mother is dead, the memory of that day on the stairs, ephemeral as the dust from a bag of concrete dropped hard on a garage floor. You’re a student in a class where your gender’s outnumbered six to one, pounded by all there is to learn, yet needled relentlessly by the mosquito-whine of being a perpetual outsider in a world of men. You sit in the lecture hall among them, hand habitually over your mouth, holding in that broken-window rage and the bottomless sorrow beneath it.