“To start writing was to cease to be a curious listener, an addressee, and to become instead the horizon point of the family line, the destination for the many-eyed, many-decked ship of family history. I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.”
