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It started early. I thought the painting of George Washington that hung in my elementary school classroom, clouds all around his big head, was God. Then I thought it was the lady with the torch at the end of the movie, but when I asked my oldest sister how they got God to agree to hold that torch, she looked at me like, who are you? I asked my parents, and they said that God doesn’t exist. This was, at least, an answer, but I wondered what the hell my Catholic grandmother was going on about when she told me that since I was the youngest and free of mortal sin, I was six, I should pray every night because the rest of my family was going straight to hell. So, I piled all my stuffed animals into my bed and in the unheated attic where we slept, I got on my knees and said, over and over, “God, don’t send my family to hell,” because I didn’t know any prayers. When I demonstrated this to my grandmother, she said nothing counted unless my bare knees were on the floor, I had knelt on my nightie. She had been raised in a Catholic convent. I quit the nightly pleas.

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My mother was chopping garlic. Catherine was in the PhD program at Rutgers. She had always been brilliant, her mind capable of analyzing the complexities of literature while still able to appreciate celebrity gossip in People Magazine. I wasn’t like her. As a child, I loved to write and found it easy to spin poetry or short stories. In college, my creative writing instructor told me I should send out my work to literary magazines, but that was my father’s territory. He was, like my oldest sister, a literary genius. I was merely clever. My stuff was whiny and self-centered. I couldn’t imagine calling myself a writer any more than I could imagine happiness.

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