SHERMAN,” MY WIFE said after reading this memoir for the first time in its entirety. “Your book is constructed in fabric squares like one of your mom’s quilts.” “I meant it that way,” I said, but that’s a half-truth. I realized I had constructed a quilt of words only after I’d read my own damn book for the first time in its entirety. And then I saw the patterns and repetition of patterns. I saw the stitches and knots. I saw that hands had worked in the same way that my mother’s hands had worked. Fabric square ad infinitum. My mother, the quilter, will always haunt me.
