Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” I cupped my palm around these words in hopes that my mother, sitting next to me in the car, hands hawkishly grasping the wheel, would not see what was making me open my eyes in wonder. I didn’t have to worry. Her mind was on her driving, or rather speeding—we had less than five hours to make it to Montreal, and we were racing against the eastbound Highway 401 traffic. My mother isn’t what you would call a bookish person. She doesn’t entirely respect books and has never understood my passion for them. “You’ve always got your nose stuck in some book,” she would say. Or, “Stop reading so much and go outside. You’re pasty-faced.” Or, “You think everything’s in a book? Get real.” But books were my salvation, an escape from my family, which included a runaway father, a volatile mother, a wayward brother, an emotionally vacant maternal grandmother, and a grandfather who, my mother alleges, molested his own children, including her, while drunk.
