Lit: A Memoir

10 Bound (#litres_trial_promo)

11 In Search of Incompetence (#litres_trial_promo)

12 Bent Bender (#litres_trial_promo)

13 Homesick (#litres_trial_promo)

14 The Inconceivable Meets the Conceivable (#litres_trial_promo)

15 Journey of the Magi (#litres_trial_promo)

16 Postal Partum (#litres_trial_promo)

17 No Mom Is an Island (#litres_trial_promo)

III SELF HELP (#litres_trial_promo)

18 Ivy Beleaguered (#litres_trial_promo)

19 The Mokus Squirreliness of the Unmet Mind (#litres_trial_promo)

20 My Concept of Commitment (#litres_trial_promo)

21 The Grinning Skull (#litres_trial_promo)

22 Mass Eye (#litres_trial_promo)

23 Lather, Rinse, Repeat (#litres_trial_promo)

24 Affliction (#litres_trial_promo)

25 Reprieve (#litres_trial_promo)

26 The Reluctantly Baptized (#litres_trial_promo)

27 The Untuned Instrument (#litres_trial_promo)

28 Halfway Home (#litres_trial_promo)

29 Ceremony (Nonbelievers, Read at Your Own Risk: Prayer and God Ahead) (#litres_trial_promo)

30 Hour of Lead (#litres_trial_promo)

IV BEING WHO YOU ARE IS NOT A DISORDER (#litres_trial_promo)

31 A Short History of My Stupidity (#litres_trial_promo)

32 The Nervous Hospital (#litres_trial_promo)

33 Waking in the Blue (#litres_trial_promo)

34 The Sweet Hereafter (#litres_trial_promo)

35 I Accept a Position (#litres_trial_promo)

36 Lake-Effect Humor (#litres_trial_promo)

37 The Death of Date-o-Rama or the Romance of the Prose (#litres_trial_promo)

38 Lord of the Flies (#litres_trial_promo)

39 God Shopping (#litres_trial_promo)

40 Dysfunctional Family Sweepstakes (#litres_trial_promo)

41 It Makes a Body Wonder (#litres_trial_promo)

42 On the Road (#litres_trial_promo)

43 The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius (#litres_trial_promo)

44 The Bog Queen (#litres_trial_promo)

45 My Sinfulness in All Its Ugliness (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Permissions (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue: Open Letter to My Son (#ulink_18d812cc-45de-5551-8b7b-ac278ae86c7a)

SIDE A : NOW (#ulink_3c9ea034-0993-5359-857f-ee3db44cf404)

Any way I tell this story is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am. It’s true that—at fifty to your twenty—my brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as you’ve often pointed out.

How many times have you stopped me throwing sofa cushions over my shoulder in search of my glasses by telling me they’re tipped atop my own knobby head? The cake we had on that birthday had twelve candles on it, not ten; and it wasn’t London but Venice where I’d blindly bought and boiled and served to our guests a pasta I mistakenly believed was formed into the boot of Italy.

And should I balk at your recall, you may bring out the video camera you’ve had strapped to your face since you were big enough to push the red Record button. You’ll zoom in on the 1998 bowl of pasta to reveal—not the Italian boot—but tiny replicas of penis and testicles. Cock and balls. That’s why the guys who sold it to me laughed so maniacally, why the au pair blanched to the color of table linen.

Through that fishbowl lens, you’ve been looking for the truth most of your life. Recently, that wide eye has come to settle on me, and I’ve felt like Odysseus, albeit with less guile and fewer escape routes, the lens itself embodying the one-eyed cyclops. You’re not the monster; my face reflected back in the lens is. Or replay is. Or I am.