My mother was a talker, but there are still so many things I want to ask her. She died when I was forty. But she did teach me to be a talker with my own children.
Susan Shreve
As a child, I was an observer, a listener for the stories of grown-ups. I led a quiet, solitary life with my mother, interrupted in the evenings by the arrival of my father who preferred to live in a state of emergency.
In the late 1990s, I wrote a book from the point of view of a young black woman who has barricaded herself in her college dorm room, pursued by a man, either real or imagined, who finally materializes as the father she has never known.
My mother listened to everything I said, carefully - not that what I said was particularly interesting, but I was her daughter.
I hate to confess that I would love to have all of my children in Washington - and at the same time, they've been all over the place, and my heart of hearts, I believe that freedom is wonderful.
Porter is my eldest child, and I tended to be fiercely protective when he was criticized. He actually was not a big complainer about school. Simply selective in what he chose to do and say.
As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear.
So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.
