I try marrying a sweet boy from my writing class—I can’t see any other way of leaving my parents’ home. But I can’t be married with much success, it seems, because during my twenties so much of me still belongs to my parents. And also because I’d grown up in confinement and now there is no part of me that can bear anything like more confinement. I don’t feel married at all, not one bit, even though I do enjoy eating lunch with the boy. So one day after washing the dishes, I sigh and say, “Yeah, I’m gonna take off now.” He and I split up in a very friendly, sociable sort of way. Not until much later—beyond the ending point of this very book—do I own enough of myself to know how to marry for the good, pure sake of marriage and not for the sake of running off. The one thing I’d taught myself in my childhood confinement is the thing that stays with me through college, work, and marriage, and that is to write. I learned that no one can stop me or make me tell the story any differently from the precise, exact, ruthless way I want to tell it.
