Violation Read Free

know the way, a thousand paths exist. All I have ever had to do to succeed as a writer was to fail, because not solving the problem means the solution lies ahead.
    I write out of what really happened, a huge field in which to roam—but a bounded field nevertheless. I sometimes work with students who are struggling to write at all. I might ask them to draw a picture of their writer’s block. One young woman covered a page in black and wrote across it, “I will be found wanting and thrown out of the universe.” We are all imposters, never more so than when we try to tell the truth. To write the essay is to be haunted by our own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what we’ve missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see. The title essay is my answer to a question that I have asked myself and been asked by others countless times: how do we know what is true? What is fair for me to say about others? What do I have the right to say, when I can never be sure about the truth?
    I try to solve the problem.
    Few things are worth writing down—that’s why there are so many boxes in my basement. But there is only one way to find out what those things are. Now and then, I have imagined not writing. What a different shape my life would have had. How much time! Mine has been a very indie, mezzanine, remainder table, 367-followers-on-Spotify type of career. What if I wasn’t writing or trying to write or avoiding writing all the time? What if I didn’t have this witness on my shoulder? What if I just … stopped.
    Instead, I fall asleep to language bouncing around my skull. Words pour through my life like drops of water, running together into a stream, becoming—
    Start here.

      Orphans
    LAST CHRISTMAS EVE MY FATHER TOOK ME BY THE ELBOW and whispered: “Your grandmother died ten years ago today. Be nice to your mother.” I had forgotten. He is a reticent and furtive man, but he remembers things. For years he would wait till a few days before Christmas and then hand me $20. “Go buy something pretty for your mother,” he would instruct, gruffly, and turn away.
    That evening while we watched television, all lined up beside each other and chatting desultorily, my mother spoke abruptly, in a new voice. “My mother died today,” she said, wonderingly, as though she’d just been told. The television prattled on. She deflects expression and emotion by riposte and foil, deftly, and we exist in the cautiously defined spaces between. It is an inharmonious harmony, tense, with voices rarely raised.
    She asked me what I remembered of my grandmother, and I told her of driving fifty miles out of our way on our last vacation just to see my grandmother’s house, the house where my mother was raised.
    â€œWas the ivy still on the chimney?” she asked, for since the house was sold she hasn’t been back. The threads tangle while we talk, a tweedy web of shifting associations: my mother and her daughter, her mother and my grandmother, and around us father and husband, brother and children, their children, my children. This is her surprise for me, her secret: my mother yearns to be a daughter again.
    My mother’s mother was a forbidding woman, stern anddrawn, with an immaculate house and a tiny yipping dog that nipped at our heels from behind her calves. She would stand in the gleaming kitchen, hot in the summer morning sun, with a spatula raised as though to swat at the first sign of disobedience. It was a house of territories, borders, boundaries, permitted and forbidden places. I knew as an undeniable law that what I valued she often ignored; that she placed value where I couldn’t see it. I searched for snails in the rose bed, hid dolls in the mail chute. She waxed the kitchen floor.
    Once in fury at her I sat on the concrete steps and tore apart her favorite philodendron, leaf by leaf, scattering the green shreds like