she sent me the bound galleys and asked me what I thought of the novel, if there was anything I would change. I was honored, but when I started reading I was surprised to find characters like my father, my mother, and myself in the pages. My character was named Jane. I’d had no idea she was writing about us. Mona had collected details of my life and put them into her book—an antique Chinese enameled pillbox she bought for me, with chrysanthemums and multicolored birds painted on a blue background. Other parts were made up—it was fiction—and the combination was confusing. At first I’d felt hurt to find my things on the pages, as if she’d taken the gifts back. Still, when I read Mona’s books, they made me want to write my own sentences.
“People write about family in fictional form,” she said. “Fiction writers use details from life.” We were at Caffe Verona, where we’d gone to talk about it. When she’d learned I was upset after reading the galleys, she flew to Palo Alto the next day from where she lived in Los Angeles to talk with me.
“It’s just what writers do. I didn’t mean to upset you. Not at all.”
Reading her book, I felt there would be nothing left for me to write about. I felt emptied out. Jane didn’t like sushi because it felt like a tongue on her tongue. The details she described made me disconsolate, as if, having described them so well, they belonged to her now, not to me.
“Why didn’t you tell me right after you read it?” she asked. “I would have changed it, or waited, or even not published at all.” But at eighteen, the idea that I could have told her what to do with her work had not felt possible.
Now the book was almost on the shelves.
Also, after reading half the book, I’d stopped. I didn’t even know what happened with my character in the end.
“You haven’t finished?” she asked. “You’ll like it, what happens to Jane.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Perhaps you’ll mention my book in your book someday,” she said, surprising me with the idea that one book might refer to another like Russian dolls; and that there might be room for more than one book about the same people, and the same time.
In the end Jane is wearing a school uniform and she rushes into a classroom with the other children. She finally belongs.
Ron thought my private school was elitist and lacked academic rigor, and he managed to convince my mother, too, so we moved house in order to be in the Palo Alto School District so I could attend public school.
Our new place, an apartment in the back of another house, was less than half the size of the small house we’d moved from, but with just as many rooms. It was like a playhouse. The wooden floor, newly sanded and varnished for our arrival, yellow as hay, shone like it was wet. Before this, we’d lived on a series of old wall-to-wall carpets, and my mother’s joy about this floor surprised me. She reassembled the tubular bed in my new room.
One night, soon after we moved in, she rented Desperately Seeking Susan to watch on our new television. I wasn’t allowed to watch it. Before this, we hadn’t owned a television. After she put me to bed, I turned myself so my head was where my feet usually were, careful not to jostle the singing springs. From there I could open the door a crack and see the screen over the back of the couch.
In the movie, a woman wore tattered black clothing, her hair in spikes, necklaces layered. The more I watched, the more I knew I wanted to look like this woman.
My mother spun around and caught me watching.
“I thought so,” she said. “Get to sleep.” She came over and shut the door.
A few days later I found a picture in a magazine—it might have been an ad for Guess or Jordache jeans—in which a woman with short, tousled hair, wet maybe, was leaping. She flew above the dark asphalt, toes pointed: perfect splits in the air. She wore a T-shirt and stonewashed jeans. I wanted to be that girl too.
Ron came over while my mother and I were standing in the kitchen. The kitchen alcove was straight across from the front door; when he stepped in, he lifted his camera to his eye.
“Don’t move,” he said, clicking. “This is really good.” We didn’t