MY MOTHER DIDN’T WANT to wreck her perfect body with childbirth, but my father needed someone he could play chess with at home, any time of day or night. I don’t know how they settled the matter. Maybe rock, paper, scissors. Feats of skill. Moot court or Oxford-style debate. Maybe I was born by a roll of the dice. One continuous war game between the two of them dominated my entire childhood. Their tournament was driven as much by lust as by hatred, and each of them took their different superpowers into the fray. My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden.
