Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

We never know who we will be in the burning building, the earthquake.

WHEREVER I AM, I AM WHAT IS MISSING.

“You will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much.”

I listened over and over again to the interview with the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk which I had noted on that early index card: “The nature of trauma,” van der Kolk had said, “is that you have no recollection of it as a story. The nature of traumatic experience is that the brain doesn’t allow a story to be created.”

grief—particularly the phenomenon known as complicated grief—runs its own course in its own time.

I once heard a psychic say that the dead are able to observe the living with compassion but not emotion.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

A psychoanalytic phrase—“unthought known”—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: “There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”

Everyone is begotten and points backwards, deeper down into the depths of beginnings.