its youthful vision, no dogs or gardens or picnics, no children, no sky: it is focused only on one thing, whether it’s on money, or on power, or on a paintbrush and a canvas. It’s a failure of vision, in fact, anyone with half a brain can see that. It’s myopia. But that’s what it takes. You need to see everything else—everyone else—as expendable, as less than yourself.
I’m like the children: my motivations and my reasons aren’t always clear. But if I can just explain, all will be elucidated; and maybe that elucidation alone will prove my greatness, however small. To tell what I know, and how it feels, if I can. You might see yourself, if I do.
3
From the beginning, then, but briefly. I was born into an ordinary family in a town an hour up the coast from Boston, called Manchester-by-the-Sea. The sixties were barely a ripple there, at the end of the Boston commuter line. It must have been our perfect beach—called Singing Beach on account of its fine, pale, musical sand, but perhaps also because it is so widely and so long lauded—that afforded me my delusions of grandeur. It makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore, with a vista open to eternity, you’ll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city.
Or maybe, more likely, they came from my mother, fierce and strange and doomed. I had a mother and a father, a big brother—eight years bigger than me, though, so we hardly seemed of the same family: by the time I was nine, he was gone—and a tortoiseshell cat, Zipper, and a mangy, runty mutt from the shelter named Sputnik, who looked like a wig of rags on sticks: his legs were so scrawny, we marveled they didn’t snap. My father worked in insurance in Boston—he took the train each morning, the 7:52—and he proceeded very respectably but apparently not very successfully, because my parents never seemed to have money to spare.
My mother stayed at home and smoked cigarettes and hatched schemes. For a while she tested cookbook recipes for a publisher. She was paid for it, and for months she fed us elaborate three- and four-course meals that involved eggy sauces and frequently, as I recall, marsala wine. Briefly and humiliatingly for me, she fancied herself a clothes designer, and spent several months at the sewing machine in the spare room in a swoon of tobacco smoke (often she held the cigarette between her lips while running a seam; I always worried that ash would fall onto the fabric). Her output was at once unusual and not unusual enough: she made paisley jersey minidresses for girls of my size, not, at first glance, dissimilar to those off the rack (“Come here, sugarplum,” she’d call, and would hold up paper patterns against my prepubescent chest, trimming away carelessly at the paper with her enormous shears, a mere whisper from my waist, or my neck); but then you’d see she’d cut portholes around the midriff and edged them with rickrack, so that a girl’s white tummy would peer through; or that she’d made the sleeves so they attached not with seams but with a flurry of ribbons, a circle of multicolored bows, that would look bedraggled after a single washing. Cheerfully impractical, she ran up at least two dozen outfits, of various designs, the summer I was nine, and then took a booth from which to flog them at the fair in a neighboring town.
I refused to sit with her there, in full view, on a brilliant Saturday in July, and went instead with my father on a tedious round of errands—the cleaners, the liquor store, the hardware store—stifling in the car but immeasurably relieved not to risk being seen by my schoolmates under my mother’s hideous handmade sign. My mother was a beloved embarrassment.
She sold a few of the clothes, but clearly felt the experiment hadn’t sufficiently succeeded, and the suitcase was stowed, unemptied, in the attic. Before too long, the sewing machine also migrated upward, and my mother entered one of her darker phases, until the next eureka moment struck.
Certainly my mother, unlike my father, instilled in me the sense that unpredictability was essential—“Not to be like your neighbor: that’s everything,” she would say—and because of this, because of the bright flame of her, it took me a long time to realize that