Moonglow

by Michael Chabon

In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.

crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention.

My mother would have sent me into the men’s room to do my own urinating and zip my own fly, but I am aware of no insult to my dignity. I understand that with my grandmother a different law obtains. A phrase I have heard comes to mind and along with it a sudden gain in understanding: She will not let me out of her sight.

he was uncomfortable with make-believe, but his fetish for self-reliance made him secretive.

Repentance is the most solitary of pursuits,

For the first and only time in his life, he felt the beauty that inhered in the idea of Jesus Christ, in the message of comfort that had managed to survive, reasonably intact, despite having been so thoroughly corrupted and profaned over the past two thousand years by Christians.

the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion.

War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe.

I had some Drambuie on hand. I assured her that it was not too early in the day to add a slug of the stuff to one’s cup of Earl Grey.

The accidental Neverlanders offered to withhold from committing a ritually unspecified act of mischief in return for a bribe of candy. My grandfather was ill at ease with this custom, relatively novel in the early 1950s.

out there somewhere a woman with a crack in her brain that was letting in shadows and leaking dreams.

He lit another cigarette and began to conduct a review of methodology, as if it were not a lost woman he sought but simply a better means of seeking, a heuristic against loss.

she gives me a fantod.

Random-sample ants of wild signal swarmed the screen.

“I’m disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That’s what they tell you to do. But when you’re old, you look back and you see all you did, with all that time, is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn’t finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn’t last or fought with all your heart to get rid of and they’re all still around. I’m ashamed of myself.”

Sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth.

she was still wearing her housecoat. This was a kind of slender tent with a Nehru collar that buttoned up the front and fell to her ankles, violently patterned with red and purple op-art oblongs. Today it would seem like the relic of an audacious moment in the history of midcentury design, but at the time I simply accepted it as routine loungewear for a grandmother.

I understood: Everything got ruined and nothing was ever finished. The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse. That was proverbial.

Since the day of his release from prison, he had never once gone looking for trouble. This turned out to be surprisingly effective as a means of avoiding it.

Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner?