THAT WORK IN THE CLINIC was the beginning of my life becoming unspeakable. So many of my stories are hard to tell. One does not go to a party and tell stories that end in “But the baby died three days later, with sepsis,” or “And then we removed the old man’s leg.” One does not go to a party and speak of blood slipping down the drain at an abortion clinic. No story I could tell seemed like it would do justice to the women I had met, anyway, and so I began to keep a kind of silence that has become part of my professional life.
