I’m also aware of a quote often attributed to Freud: “All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.” I wasn’t even standing near the front of that line. In my family, in my home, in the time and the circumstances in which I was raised, anyone who could do nine years without speaking outside the family was a champ and a blessing and a bullet dodged, not a problem to be solved. I’ve drawn a line down the page here, in invisible ink, between the part of the story that’s mine to tell and that which belongs to other people, both the living and the dead. I put my ear to the
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