Lisa Zeidner

Show me a photo of a doleful Romanian orphan or a disoriented Ethiopian toddler with flies on his eyelashes, propped up by his dying mother, and I will get teary-eyed immediately. Maybe all parents do. No doubt that becoming a parent changes — and intensifies — your fears about your own mortality. It also introduces some thorny logistical decisions that are different, I believe, for our generation than for our parents’.

My husband’s parents are dead. My parents are 72. They can survive (just) a week baby-sitting, but they are not good long-range prospects as guardians. My sister in North Carolina now has a toddler of her own, so she might rally herself to more enthusiasm about inheriting my son than she did on the occasion of that fateful first separation, three years ago. At that point she said, somewhat vaguely, “Maybe you’d better ask Russell.”

So if we die, our son Nicolas — and the life-insurance money — will go to my brother in San Francisco, who is, despite the tattoos and earrings, a kind, reliable adult.

Or so I thought.

“How much money do I get?” Russell asked, when we rubber-stamped the arrangements for the will.

A million, give or take. Probably, we told him, enough for college.

“Cool!” Russell said. “Forget college. Nick and I are going to Tahiti.”

He was kidding, I think.

Nick’s first reaction to the prospect of life with Uncle Russell was enthusiastic. “We’ll get a lot of pizzas,” he said, “and throw them at each other, and throw ice cream, too.” But then he began to worry. “How will I get to San Francisco?” he wanted to know. How would he know we were dead? If we didn’t pick him up at school, would they just leave him locked up there in the dark? And who was Russell’s wife? Did he have one? Did she want children?

An uncanny question, since Russell’s girlfriend would rather have head lice than children.

Of course it is family to whom you are supposed to turn in a crisis, to the rock-steady obligation of blood ties. But family no longer seems to have the same societal weight. While I’m lucky to be close to my siblings, many people I know only speak to theirs, grudgingly, at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It’s hard to imagine that, if all members of my immediate family got struck by lightning, a cousin in a distant port could be sent a telegram saying, “You’re all he has left,” old-novel-style, and feel any moral compunction to rise to the occasion. I thought of this, repeatedly, during the heartbreaking Turkish earthquake. If buildings collapse on us, believe me, no caravans of concerned second and third cousins are going to be braving the jammed New Jersey Turnpike with their own generators in tow to rescue us.

My son barely knows his aunt and uncle, much less his extended family. Now that people don’t regularly stay put and die in their hometowns, it’s more difficult to foster the close, daily relationships that might allow people to comfortably embrace a child not their own.

Even the simple fact that people marry and procreate later changes things radically. My parents should not be so old in relation to their grandchild (though I thank them for not noting this more regularly during my dating years). If we’d started a family earlier, we might have had time for more than the one little tyke, which in movies, at least, seems to make orphanhood more bearable.

An old friend and his wife asked her sister to take their two boys in the event of their death. The sister said, curtly, “I don’t really like any kids other than my own.” So the winner is — his 70-year-old parents. (Hers are bitterly divorced, and anyhow her father and his third wife have their hands full with a toddler of their own.)

“Well, we’ll take your boys,” I offered, at a rare dinner. We’ve known them for almost a quarter of a century but we live 1,000 miles apart; I see them once, twice a year.

“And we’ll take yours!” they agreed.

We clinked glasses to jocularly seal the deal.

Surely we must have better options. What about my local friends? Shouldn’t I have friends whose children are the same age as my children, whom I see regularly, who will take my son in for an afternoon if I need a couple of hours by myself for, say, root canal work? Well, I don’t. We barely see our friends. Most of them can’t make room for lunch, much less a grief-stricken orphan.

One of these friends spent weeks trying to get off work for a mammogram. Her frantic schedule was not the only problem. She was terrified. “I can’t die,” she said. “I can’t die now. It is out of the question. I have kids.”

This line made me churlish. Would dying be peachy if she were childless? Are Americans so unable to admit to any personal longings that even a desire to live must be deemed selfish unless wrapped in the flag of Family Values?

I thought of the warped, silly sentimentality of “Titanic” — the bad guy grabbing the baby so he could get the last seat on the lifeboat. What a cur! Yet if Kate Winslet had simply boarded the goddamn lifeboat when she was supposed to, Leonard DiCaprio would not have had to give her his seat on the piece of flotsam, and he would have lived. If that’s generous love, give me selfishness. It’s OK to want to live, even without children.

True to my friend’s wildest fears, the mammogram turned up something suspicious. She had a biopsy, the news was good and she was told that she was in no danger. The last couple of developments happen much quicker on the page than they did in life, and I don’t want to belittle her panic — I’d gone through it myself — but this friend acted, every step of the way, as if it were time to pick out her headstone. She simply knew she was going to die.

“Cut them off!” she begged her doctor, in re her breasts. “My kids need me!” Another woman I know remains convinced, despite the reassurances of several doctors, that she is at extremely high risk for breast cancer. She also worries about brain tumors from living too close to high-tension wires. And toxic mold. This is less fear for their children than, in my utterly unqualified psychiatric opinion, a plea for attention and appreciation. These women had been so buried in the relentless needs of their families that they feel invisible, even to themselves. And being too generous, too other-directed, to complain, they unconsciously seize on an opportunity to set the score straight. It’s the grown-up version of a game we all play when we’re little: “Won’t you all miss me when I’m gone. And boy will you be sorry.”

Now that my son is 8, he’s quite capable of wishing me dead if I, say, make him do his homework. He understands about the insurance money. He has let it be known that in the event of my death he would like to be able to spend it at his discretion, without an intermediary. There are certain Pokimon cards he would like to buy, on Ebay. He would like a new bike with — “Wheelies”? “Poppers”? He would also like to visit the surfing beach in Australia that he saw in “Endless Summer.”

We have explained that the money is for college. “Why would I need to go to college,” he retorts, “if I’m a millionaire?” He has now met Russell’s girlfriend; he even liked her. But of course he cannot really conceive of losing us.

We all want to bequeath our children the dependable yet twinkling goodwill of Jimmy Stewart in Bedford Falls. But it’s not as if “It’s a Wonderful Life” was a piece of social realism in 1946. Every orphan is an orphan out of Dickens. For all our careful nest feathering, our son is about as buffered against ugly contingency as a passenger wearing a safety belt during a plane crash.

My brother Russell, it turns out, is on many parents’ approved-guardian lists. In fact, he has agreed to take five little boys in addition to my own. This disturbed me at first, but now I try to look on the bright side: Half-a-dozen screaming boy-children in a one-bedroom, one-bath house on Potrero Hill might rouse themselves to some amusing food fights.

My brother and his girlfriend, who are heavily involved with virtual reality R&D, don’t do Christmas, but I hear they have a really good homeopath. It’s a charmingly high-concept extended family — not a wonderful life, perhaps, but it will have to be good enough.

Next to 50, my 20 years with my husband are not so impressive, especially since we’ve actually been married for only 12 of those years. During our unusually long courtship, we basically tried in every way imaginable to break up, including a 2,500-mile commute and some in-your-face Seeing of Other People. I would call our story anti-romantic. Our courtship was like a violent session of product testing, at the end of which we discovered that the relationship we thought was flimsy was, in fact, shockingly sturdy: not a knapsack, but Samsonite.

I tell you all this only to acknowledge that I am not the person Hallmark would hire to dispense Valentine’s Day advice. If anything, I am a Scrooge of romance. Organized romance is about exactly as dangerous and misguided as organized religion, and for pretty much the same reasons. Love, unlike romance, is gnarled, not terribly flashy or photogenic — and furthermore mostly private, which is why we read fiction, because fiction best clues us in on the parts of the heart that don’t show up on camera.

Yet when I teach fiction workshops, I often notice gaps in the writers’ love smarts. They get the outsize, florid gestures of passion, disaffection and jealousy — the “throwing the beloved on the kitchen counter to fuck her” kind of moments and the “boiling the other woman’s pet” moments — more than they get the tender, enduring stuff of love, or even the more knotty psychiatric issues that, in what is called real life, wreck most relationships. So I wind up trying to thrust at students the books from which I’ve learned the most about matters of the heart — including a fair amount of nonfiction.

I think it is fair to say that I would not still be with my husband without “Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage” by Maggie Scarf.

With clarity and compassion, Scarf explains the underlying dynamics of courtship and marriage. “Love at first sight,” she contends, may be a matter of instinctively recognizing someone who will allow you to continue in comfortingly familiar — and often destructive — patterns learned in childhood. Through a series of case studies that read like good detective fiction, Scarf shows how marriage counselors use a device called a “genogram,” a complicated family tree of emotional issues, to trace the similarities in partners’ pasts. Even pairs who seem like radical opposites find themselves startled by spooky coincidences and shared traumas. It’s not just alcoholism that tends to run in families, but things like infidelity (see the Kennedys’ genogram), suicide (see the Fondas), even unemployment.

From Scarf I learned to understand the concept of “projective identification,” in which one person in the marriage pawns off on a mate whatever traits he or she can’t quite admit to — anger, depression, neediness, inadequacy. In projective identification, a couple in essence splits up emotions as well as chores. One partner will always be weak, the other always strong. The logical, cool-headed man with an explosive wife is one such division of labor. Perhaps the most common form of projective identification is the marital model Scarf calls “pursuer-distancer,” where one partner (almost always the woman) cries out for closeness while the other demands distance.

Soppier sorts might call this “finding your better half,” but Scarf explains why such relationships almost always fail. The notion of projective identification is at once alarmingly simple and surprisingly complicated. Understanding that dynamic has profoundly influenced my writing as well as my marriage, because novelists fall in love with their characters in very much the same ways that they fall in love off the page — choosing alter egos who are nicer, smarter and sexier than their creators or, conversely, bolder and badder (as Milton just adored Satan).

Scarf argues that a healthy marriage gives its partners both closeness and autonomy. Balance is everything. You don’t want to be lost in space, and you don’t want to be smothered either. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke understood this almost a century ago: “At bottom no one else in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone.”

Cheerful, no? That from Rilke’s “Letters on Love and Other Difficulties.” Auden didn’t call Rilke “the Santa Claus of Loneliness” for nothing.

Despite the fact that Rilke was a basket case and his own love life a train wreck, his prose on the nature of love is magnificent. He contends that “a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of each other’s solitude.”

A togetherness between two people is an impossibility … But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest of human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

It’s hard to make the case for peace and privacy in a marriage. Maybe those quiet qualities are simply not dramatic enough. Literature abounds with failed love affairs and failed marriages. The last straw for Emma Bovary was when she shuddered, repulsed, at how her dolt-hubby Charles clicked his spoon against his teeth while he ate his soup.

For a how-not-to of marriage, “Madame Bovary” can’t be beat, especially when read in conjunction with “Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet, Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert’s Muse” by Francine du Plessix Gray.

Louise Colet, who was the model for Emma Bovary, was an older woman. She and her boy toy Gustave (still living with his mama) were so hot and heavy at the beginning of their commuting relationship that Gus kept one of her beguiling little slippers with him while she was away, to scratch and sniff and — well, one does not want to contemplate what else. But then Louise got whiny about commitment, he loped off to explore the great syphilis-bestowing mysteries of the whores of the Orient and then, after she frantically banged on his door one night in an attempt to get what heartbroken women everywhere are still calling “closure,” he proceeded to pen what may well be the nastiest kiss-off letter in the proud history of kiss-off letters.

Madame: I was told that you took the trouble to come and see me three times last evening.

I was not in. And, fearing that your persistence might provoke me to humiliate you, wisdom leads me to warn you that I shall never be in.

I have the honor of saluting you.

G.F.

Then he gleefully burned all of her letters.

She kept his, however, thus giving us one of the most fascinating records literature has of a creative process. You want projective identification à la Scarf’s “pursuer-distancer” model, try your ex-lover publicly mocking you in print, in a wildly unflattering portrait that all of your mutual friends can tell is you, and then declaring, mistily, Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

Suicide soul sisters Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina are not, perhaps, the best spokeswomen for the joys of romantic love. Not the gals you want to book into hotels with heart-shaped waterbeds or smear with edible chocolate.

“All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The first line of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” is widely quoted — and widely misunderstood. Because Tolstoy means, partly, that happiness looks easy and predictable only from outside, to observers. Inside, it’s far more Byzantine and engrossing.

Unlike the relentlessly grim “Madame Bovary,” “Anna Karenina” offers not only the story of a tragic affair but an encyclopedia of thought about every possible kind of love — marital and parental as well as sexual.

At almost 1,000 pages it’s constructed as intricately as a trick box or a Russian nesting toy, so structurally perfect it’s infuriating (to another writer, at least). Every scene has an echo or refrain, so that the magnificent bit in Chapter 15 when Levin proposes to Kitty and pulls an all-nighter, in wigged-out bliss, to await her answer is replayed, almost to the letter but in a very different register, at the novel’s end, before Anna K. hurls herself in front of the train.

When I first read the novel, I was still in my 20s, in heavy dating mode. Every time Kitty and Levin interrupted the story of Anna and Vronsky’s steamy affair, I was irritated by their domestic minutiae. Tolstoy’s alter ego Levin himself irritated me — all somber, pompous and philosophical. Only now, in middle age, do I realize how dead-on Levin was about almost everything. Here he is after three months of marriage:

He was happy, but having embarked on family life he saw at every step that it was not at all what he had anticipated. At every step he took he felt like a man would feel who, after admiring the smooth happy motion of a little boat upon the water, had himself got into the boat. He found that besides sitting quietly without rocking he had to keep a lookout, not for a moment forget where he was going, or that there was water under his feet, and that he had to row, although it hurt his unaccustomed hands; in short, that it only looked easy, but to do it, though very delightful, was very difficult.

Exactly.

The Collected Tales and Poems Edgar Allan Poe
The father of all bad real estate. The crumbling, moldy, moss-sprouting walls in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the torture chamber in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the lavish but still-infected Prospero Palace in “The Masque of the Red Death” (a no-one-is-safe story I remember whenever I read about gated communities being burglarized): Poe is a catalog of real estate woes. You can’t even trust the walls, which tend to close in to bury you alive.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The house is haunted. It’s really hard to heat. The new landlord sucks. And out there on the howling moors, you’re not exactly commuting distance. (Runner-up in the category of “haunted house you couldn’t have a harder time reselling if it were located right at the scenic Love Canal”: Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”)

The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino
Calvino is probably better known for his tale of glorious, magical real estate, “Invisible Cities.” But I am exceedingly fond of this collection, which contains “The Argentine Ant,” his 1952 story about a young family that embarks on a clean new life in a wonderful new house, only to uncover its horrible — and incurable — infestation.

Survival at Auschwitz by Primo Levi
I know, I know — you think you know the story. But the genius of Levi’s memoir, probably the finest memoir ever written, is the calm objectivity of his method of “bearing witness.” He begins, of course, with the real estate. What are the bunks like? The restroom facilities? His cool account of how visitors are required to leave their shoes at the door — then scramble for a pair of clogs that may or may not fit — is shockingly moving.

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
The French philosopher’s examination of how houses are used as metaphors. Attics, basements, closets: They all mean something. A useful book not only for the literary critic but for the dream interpreter — Bachelard discusses, for instance, why we tend to dream about houses where we used to live.

Through these waves of critical reaction, the memoir has settled into a comfortable publishing niche. Not terribly surprising — nonfiction has always sold better than fiction. So now the fresh writing program graduate is more likely to pen an earnest piece of “creative nonfiction” than an ironic roman-`-clef. And midlist writers hoping to revivify their careers consider weighing in with the requisite reminiscence. This is not necessarily a bad trend, even if the books are marketed less for their literary value than for their appeal to very specialized clientele. If you have lost a fortune to gambling or a child to a drunken driver, have found God or been hit by lightning, there’s a memoir for you, and no doubt it’ll come up on your personalized Amazon.com recommendation page.

It’s always unfair to hold writers responsible for their P.R. — unless they believe the hype themselves. So we must begin by forgiving Mary Karr. Her new memoir, “Cherry,” is being shilled as a tale of sexual awakening — not a bad idea for the trash-talking and succulent-simile’d Karr, but not actually what she wrote. “Cherry” is a fairly standard ’70s coming-of-age tale, with more drugs and rock ‘n’ roll than sex. If you come to the book hoping to part the tightly folded legs on its cover, you will be disappointed.

The flap copy on “Cherry” further credits Karr’s bestselling memoir, “The Liar’s Club,” with having “enough literary verve to spark a renaissance in memoir writing.” As Mary Karr herself would say, don’t believe that for a Yankee minute. Or: Say that again and I’ll tear you a new asshole. So for the record, let us note that Karr by no means discovered this vein but is digging in a well-known mine. Nevertheless, just because she didn’t invent the diamond doesn’t mean hers isn’t shiny.

Let us pause, however, to give credit where credit is due. The grand dames of American creative nonfiction (in Europe, personal essays never went so totally out of favor) are Joan Didion and Annie Dillard, who in the ’70s created highly stylized, almost mythical personae for themselves. Memoir’s godfathers are the Wolff boys. Geoffrey Wolff’s 1979 memoir, “The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father,” was structured very much like a conventional biography — except it told his own tale of life with a colorful, enigmatic father after his parents’ divorce. His little brother, Tobias Wolff, told his side of the story, about life with mother, in the 1989 “This Boy’s Life.” The junior Wolff’s innovation was to use a more fictional structure and voice, so that his tale, though true, was as zippy, tight and metaphorically coherent as his own short stories.

Not coincidentally, Tobias Wolff was Karr’s colleague at Syracuse University and acknowledged as a mentor in “The Liar’s Club.” Karr learned his lessons well. She shares with Wolff not only a gift for lingering on a resonant image, but for talking about hardship without a trace of self-pity. It’s Karr’s tender-toughness that distinguished “The Liar’s Club,” her account of her ugly childhood in Leechfield, Texas. Crazy, deserting and alcoholic parents, illness, poverty, sexual assaults by babysitters: Nothing got Little Mary down. “People who whined about their childhoods were woosies,” Karr wrote. Perhaps because the town was “teeming with chemical and genetic mutations,” the people of Leechfield, Karr claims in “Cherry,” “tolerated affliction with more grace than most places I’ve lived,” and even gave wide berth to delinquents: “In every Texan’s mind there sleeps some genetically wired pathway that makes running afoul of the law okay.”

By high school, Karr herself would have her own run-ins with authority. “Cherry” covers Karr’s progress from the beginning of seventh grade until the day she leaves Leechfield for California in 1972 with a vanload of stoned cohorts, “embracing the skittery surface of surfing and psychedelia.” Even in the mosquito-infested backwaters of Leechfield, Karr manages to push every hot button of her generation, from free love and war protests to Plath-like suicide attempts.

Karr describes the slide from childhood into adolescence with dead-on accuracy and deadpan humor. “I took undue interest,” she recalls, “in the occasional chameleon that slithered from the tangle of honeysuckle through the vents of the air conditioner in my room. Once I spent a whole morning at the bathroom mirror trying to get one such unfortunate lizard to serve as a dangly earring by biting my earlobe. (If you squeezed his soft neck just right, his mouth would open like a clasp.) But he’d only bite down for a second or so before his jaw opened and he fell down on my shirt front or into the sink and I’d have to catch him again. His tail finally broke off, and our Siamese — then hugely pregnant — wolfed him down her gullet in two quick swallows.”

Speaking of the movement of mouths, Karr does as good a job in detailing her first kisses with a freckled boy named John Cleary. “Suddenly I know so much. I understand about waves and cross tides and how jellyfish float and why rivers empty themselves in the Gulf. I understand the undulating movement of the stingray on ‘Sea Hunt’ and the hard forward muscle of the shark. Now I know why they call it petting, for even though I’m more still in the plush warmth of his mouth than I can ever get in church, my whole body is purring. I let my self breathe into him a breath that tastes like ashes from a long fire.”

“Cherry” bustles with writing that fine — passages so lively and precise you don’t stop to demand why you’re reading an entire memoir, written largely in second person, about your adolescence in Leechfield. The problem with Karr’s adolescence is precisely that it’s so much like yours, or mine, or anyone else’s. The slumber parties, the spin-the-bottle, the hostile eighth-grade guidance counselors — it’s all pretty much regulation, right down to the carload of tripping white teens bravely venturing to hear good blues at the seedy club.

Perhaps what was most interesting about that period is how fully it leveled socioeconomic differences. The crest of teens who came of age when Karr did could believe, correctly, that their backgrounds didn’t matter. In 1972, Karr could shed Leechfield. Although the memoir is ostensibly about the extent to which her past shaped her, Karr generally just describes her numb confusion during the period, eschewing adult reflection. And that’s a shame. Often, reading “Cherry,” readers may wonder how Karr feels now — as a sane and successful woman, as a mother or college professor, as someone who presumably unlike her teenage incarnation does not fake her orgasms — about the inchoate self that she was.

For instance, a reader can easily believe that Karr did not know what to make, at the age of 15, of her mother hauling her off to an OB-GYN for a supply of birth control pills. “Your mother holds loudly forth on any and all pussy-related subjects, with nothing falling too far off limits. You’ll be sitting at the kitchen bar wolfing down cereal, and she’ll say out of the blue, Do you know what a blow job is, honey? Or: I hope you feel comfortable touching yourself down there. It makes you want to bury your head under a pillow for the remainder of any meal.” But how does Karr feel about this in retrospect? Is she proud? Appalled? Both?

Karr suggests that she came of age in a period when definitions of womanhood were in transition. Certainly Karr’s mother, with her seven marriages, artistic aspirations and scorn for convention, was an atypical role model. Despite the birth control pills and her fervent bathroom reading of Henry Miller, Karr accepted the oldfangled dictum that “pussy is a high-ticket item right up until and during the night you relinquish it. Then it becomes a commodity and you along with it — with no more value-added than frozen OJ or pork belly.” But again, her memoir offers no clear argument about how Karr managed to permute into the self she prophesied in her diary at age 11 — “a real woman, a hardworking woman with a pure soul. Not just a perfumed woman on the outside.” Because the adult woman has so little voice here, the account of her sexual coming-of-age feels vague and truncated.

Karr’s decision to cleave only to what she felt at the time is a quite conscious one. “We tend to overlay grown-up wisdoms across the blanker selves that the young actually proffer,” she says. But to tell us she was clueless as a youth is to tell us not quite enough about either herself or her time, however vivid her memories.

Indeed, many readers may question the veracity of memories quite this specific. Can Karr really recall these huge chunks of dialogue? Does she really remember how, on a given day in eighth grade,

Mother wanders out with the New York Times crossword, her reading glasses balanced on the end of her nose.

“An eight-letter word for potentate,” Mother says.

“Monarch?” Lecia [Karr's sister] says. With her rat-tail brush, she sections off a parcel of hair on her crown and slaps some more Dep on it before wrapping the ends around a brush roller.

“That’s seven letters, numb nuts,” I say.

Passages like that are, of course, the downside of novelizing your life. Obviously Karr is re-creating rather than reproducing the scene. It must also be noted that prodigious recall is an essential skill for the autobiographer. Take a look at Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak Memory”, in which he claims to remember not only every last detail of playing, at age 4, under a couch in long-abandoned Russia, “a big cretonne-covered divan, white with black trefoils, in one of the drawing rooms at Vyra,” but also what color he associated with each letter of the alphabet as he learned to write.

To talk about your own exploits in this kind of detail will always make you a target of some suspicion and bitterness. (“Jeez, how much more does that woman have to say about her life?” a writer friend e-mailed me.) The commodification of pussy is nothing next to the commercialization of an autobiographical persona. Think of aw-shucksy Garrison Keillor, or Annie Lamott’s cheerfully “kooky” spiritual ramblings. Especially with a book as successful as “The Liar’s Club,” Karr risks turning into a narcissistic self-parody: the sassy straight-shooter unafraid to speak of the forbidden. She risks turning, in fact, into her own flamboyant mother.

But those accusations would be unfair in regard to “Cherry.” Karr convinces us that the impulse to self-revelation served — and serves — a real purpose for her. “Kids in distressed families,” she says, “are great repositories of silence and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not to be told.” What saved Karr was writing itself — the promise of reaching truth on the page. Karr was a poet first, and despite the weaknesses of this memoir, every page evinces a poet’s luxuriant respect for language, “each letter forged into a gleaming shield.”

A kid in seventh grade liked to torture me. Actually lots of kids liked to torture me, but Bill pushed the envelope: He held a pocket knife to my back while I was bent over a water fountain at my perfectly lovely suburban junior high in Silver Spring, Md.

There had been some questions, theretofore, about the degree of savagery to which I had been exposed. I was prone to writerly exaggeration. But on this occasion, a teacher saw him. And the tip of the knife ripped my dress. So I had evidence.

When I told my mother, she got in the car. She drove right to Bill’s house. When she returned, she looked very satisfied. “I don’t think he’ll be bothering you anymore,” she said. And he didn’t.

Later, she told me she’d rang his doorbell and told his surprised mother that she needed to talk to Bill alone. She pulled him out of the mother’s hearing range, then leaned her face into his like a boot-camp sergeant.

“When you see my daughter walking down the street,” she said, smiling, “I want you to cross to the other side. If you see her walking down the hallway at school, you flatten yourself to the wall and let her pass. Otherwise, I am going to personally hammer you to the fucking wall.”

Or maybe it was something like: “Otherwise, I am going to stuff your testicles in your mouth and serve you for dinner like a suckling pig.” The exact wording varied in the retelling, but each time I felt thrilled by the Dirty Harry-ness of it all.

Yes, let children fight their own battles. My mother knew how to do that too. (I called her from a pay phone while on a bilious LSD trip my freshman year of college, to inform her that I had no idea who I was or what I was doing on the planet. She suggested that I make myself a cup of tea and get some sleep, then basically hung up on me.)

On the other hand, it’s pretty cool to have a mother who is tireless in your defense against the evils of the world — the bullies, the elementary school teachers with all the charm and warmth of nurse Ratchet, the chat room pederasts.

Childhood is a vale of tears — always has been, always will be. I thank my mother for helping me to reach adulthood in something other than a body bag.

He was very serious, with good posture and impeccable manners.
He was always careful to tip gas station attendants a neatly folded dollar.
“Thank you so much. I appreciate your service,” he would say, bowing slightly and rolling those Transylvanian R’s. His father had instructed him in this American gratuity
custom. I told him that, to the best of my knowledge, no one in
the history of Silver Spring, Md., had ever tipped a gas
station attendant, but it was clear that he didn’t value my input as a cultural insider.

His parents were both journalists who had traveled around the world; I was a bureaucrat’s daughter with a set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas that were outdated before we even unpacked them. “Journalists,” my father said. “Sure. ‘Journalists.’ They’re spies, you imbecile. Spies!”

I thought this was enormously funny. “The Russians are
coming! The Russians are coming!” I would squeal, running away
and flapping my arms as if I were on fire. This much I knew about the world in 1970: My father was a jerk.

But of course the parents were spies. In the den off their living room, they had, instead of a TV in front of a
Barcalounger, an entire wall of state-of-the-art transmission
equipment with headphones, dials and clocks indicating the
current time in Washington, Moscow and London, site of
their last posting. The equipment was heavy metal and Buck
Rogers-looking, with bad-ass welding joints such as you might
find on primitive space shuttles. This equipment, the son told
me proudly, was capable of sending a message anywhere on the planet.

Since his parents never appeared to be home — in fact, I’m
not sure I ever even met them — he demonstrated. He let me type
in a message to send to Moscow.

“Eat Shit and Die, Pig Honky,” I typed, letter by letter,
into the little scrolling window they still use for stock quotes.

That was the current hip expletive: I would guess it was a corruption of something Linda Blair spluttered in “The Exorcist,” except that didn’t come out until 1973. He pressed a button, and the window informed me, “Message Transmitted.”

Or rather, it informed him, in Russian, and he translated.

“If they were spies,” I parried to my father, “do you think they’d teach their son how to use the machine? Do you think he’d let me tell Moscow to go fuck itself?”

“He didn’t send the message, you moron. He was just trying to impress you, to garner sexual favors.”

My father was concerned about losing his security clearance. “Concerned” is too mild. He was apoplectic. I disputed not only the spy theory, but the fact that my desk-jockey father, who did, granted, work for the Army — but only as a psychologist, specializing in Human Factors — needed a security clearance to begin with.

The Russian and I attended a prom together. We felt superior and bored, and ducked out to engage in various protosexual activities in his father’s gargantuan car as well as, later
(since his parents were, as usual, out), his house. These were my very earliest sexual experiences and you would think that I’d remember them. I don’t. All I have is the cologne, an image of a crushed corsage and my father wagging his finger at me, intoning: “Later in your life, men are going to sit you down in a room and show you a film of you kissing that boy and doing whatever else you did with that boy. You will be up for a job and
suddenly that film will appear.”

My career plans were to be a poet. I sincerely doubted that a home movie of heavy petting would prove much of a hindrance.

The Russian and I saw each other for a while until I started dating Gary (not his real name), with whom I went further and about whom I have more detailed memories. The mildewed basement of Gary’s parents’ split-level, where I first smoked hash and first performed fellatio, was done up in a nautical theme: plastic marlins, fake starfish hanging from the walls in nets. Gary would later turn very devout and study, unsuccessfully, to be a rabbi. He wrote me two decades later, to catch up about his wife’s fertility problems and his career in computer programming.

The Russian was not someone I thought about until recently, when my doorbell rang and a near-retirement-age man with dentures held up an FBI identification card.

He told me his name. He was conducting a background check on a woman who had applied for a job with the bureau and had lived across the street in 1989. Did I know her? Did I know anything about her character?

“We just moved in,” I said. “We don’t know anyone.”

“And where did you live before?”

I told him.

“And can I ask you to spell your name?”

I spelled. My 5-year-old son, who was in the other room watching “Spy Hard,” came out to spell his name as well. With a flourish, the FBI agent wrote down my son’s name.

The next day, while I was on the phone with a distraught,
divorce-bound girlfriend, my phone began to emit some bizarre-sounding clicks.

“Are you bugged?” she asked.

“Funny you should ask,” I said. “The FBI was here yesterday. In fact, I think they’re here right now.”

Walking with the cordless phone toward the window, I saw a man idling in a sky-blue K-car right across from my house.

I ransacked my past for un-American activities other than the Russian. Later in high school I had helped establish an underground student organization called Merlin, but our most
political act was to get the lunch break extended from a half-hour to 45 minutes.

I forgot about the car until my husband, John, called to me from another room about a week later: “Some guy’s outside taking pictures of our house.” He was in another square car of no character, at a discreet distance. When we saw us looking, he drove off.

I am not paranoid. There are many reasons why someone might take pictures of our house. We live in Haddonfield, N.J., in a historic district of stately Victorians; our house was built by a dentist who treated Abraham Lincoln at Colorado Springs and did a stint as the personal dentist to the dictator of Peru before returning to become a pillar of the community: a Quaker banker. People around here make life works of restoring their exteriors and often stop to compare paint colors or local real estate tax assessments.

But the phone kept clicking. And I’d been thinking about the Russian. So I called the FBI to see if there was, indeed, a file on me.

I expected a runaround. Instead a cheerful lady at the Philadelphia branch put me right through to Special Agent John R. Thomas, who pretty much dictated the letter I should send to his attention, and reminded me to get it notarized.

“He was so friendly!” I reported to my husband.

Whereas everywhere but Los Angeles I still have to stifle the urge to smile and wave at policemen — when I was a girl, they gave me such delightful princess treatment — John, who is eight years older and almost had to move to Canada to avoid the draft,
still harbors all sorts of fear and loathing about authority figures.

“Yeah, right,” he almost spat. “‘Friendly.’ It figures. The FBI,” he said, “is like the Catholic Church. Thirty years ago they were still executioners, terrorists. Now they just sing
folk songs.”

He’s right. Pretty soon the FBI will have its own Web site. “Airport Security & You.” “Desert Storm Support Groups.”

I walked the two blocks to downtown Haddonfield, quaint as a set from a movie about small-town life (the Rotary Club, a banner gushed, would soon host its annual oyster supper), and had my letter notarized. How adorably antiquated: I present a driver’s
license to a Rotarian’s wife with a beehive, and she attests that I am me. Like she’d know if the driver’s license was a fake, any more than I’d be able to spot a forged FBI identification card.

“Can’t I fax it?” I had asked Special Agent Thomas, but he said the notary’s seal had to be an original. So I mailed the letter certified (another charmingly quaint custom, given UPS and FedEx tracking software) and waited.

The very next day, an out-of-town colleague, a fellow novelist and professor who had left a couple of messages on my answering machine, finally caught up with me.

Last fall he had gotten a disturbing death threat over his university e-mail account. The mail was traced to the library at my university, which supposedly kept track of who uses the
computers. But despite the fact that the library had recently been victim to a bomb threat — a pipe bomb had been found in a hollowed-out cookbook on the stacks, after our president made some remarks taken to be racist — the library had no record, couldn’t help at all. Did I have any ideas?

“No,” I said. “The library is open to the public, though, so it could be anyone. Might it have anything to do with something in your work?”

“Unlikely. Whoever it is knows far too much about the politics in our department. A disgruntled undergraduate seems the most likely suspect.”

I asked him if they’d checked the law school, the business school.

“Good idea. I’ll pass that on to the FBI. They’re handling it now, because I was pretty upset and couldn’t get anywhere here or with your university police.”

“Hate to break this to you,” I told him, “but it appears that I’m your main suspect.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

I outlined the events of the past weeks.

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” he said. “I’m awfully sorry. I’ll tell them to lay off, OK?”

As if the FBI were his own personal mall security force.

We exchanged e-mail addresses and promised to keep each other posted. At this point, even without a death threat, I was indeed beginning to feel paranoid. Let someone intercept my cell phone calls from my car if they were unlucky enough — despairing negotiations with my husband about who’s picking up our son from his after-school program and what we are going to have for dinner — but I found it distasteful to think about people
reading my e-mail.

I longed for the physical reality of a letter, in an envelope, with a stamp. Letters that can be censored or hidden or lost, like a glove or love is lost. Even an old-fashioned
death threat with potential fingerprints, hand-delivered, made out of letters cut from newspapers, so the typewriter can’t be traced.

What if (this suddenly occurred to me) my sophomore boyfriend himself were the Russian operative? Chosen for his young appearance to infiltrate the high schools, where he would
date the daughters of Washington bureaucrats and thus easily obtain access to highly confidential information about the army’s research and development? No wonder there were never “parents.” While I was in the bathroom, he could rifle through the papers in my father’s briefcase, clicking away with his mini-camera.

Just to explore: “Hey Dad,” I said, on a visit to D.C. He is retired now, generally much more easygoing than in days of yore. “Remember that Russian I dated in high school?”

“No,” he said.

I reminded him. “Spies?”

He shrugged. “Sounds like they were journalists. If they were spies, why would they keep such big equipment right out there in the open?”

“To make it look like they were journalists? Why would an ordinary journalist warrant a computer like that in 1970?”

“It wasn’t a computer,” he said. “In 1970 they still had the huge mainframes. Johns Hopkins would have had one, not your boyfriend’s parents.”

I should have known that. Someday, perhaps, I can dandle a grandkid on my knee and reminisce about my first primitive Kaypro computer.

“What were you working on at the time? Anything memorable?”

Animated now, my father told me that one of his major projects had been recently declassified, so he was free to discuss it with me. He had spent a decade as a player on SAMOS, the first space satellite to take pictures of the earth.

This was before it was all done electronically, he explained — the photographs were dropped by parachute in canisters into the Indian Ocean, recaptured by wetsuited Navy SEALs. His work had to do with photo image interpretation, evaluating the expertise of the interpreters. This was so sensitive that when he took us on a family vacation to Europe in 1968, he had to be debriefed for two weeks on what to do if he were captured by a foreign government. His comportment was fairly critical, since he had signed a paper agreeing that if he revealed anything, the penalty was death.

Talk about covering your ass — the United States government had the legal right to have my dad terminated.

“So you would have been pretty concerned if I were dating a Russian,” I said.

“Sure! If I knew that a neighbor had attended a function at
the Russian Embassy, I would have been afraid to attend a party at [his] house.”

So he socialized mostly with other bureaucrats who had secret lives. One man I thought was an importer-exporter worked for the National Security Agency. Another, an academic
completing a masterwork on German culture, was a CIA operative.

I assume he is not making all this up.

“Well, those days are over, right?” I asked. “Espionage is a thing of the past, right? Gone the way of vinyl records?”

“Of course not,” he said. “Look at Rich Ames.”

“Who?”

“Don’t you read the paper? The double-agent who — wait. How
can you write about this? You don’t know anything about this.”

“The piece isn’t actually about spying,” I explained. “It’s
really more about — well, the ’70s. Sex.”

He exhaled and did his eyebrow-lift, as if to say, And they let you
educate our nation’s youth?

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

The FBI was slow, but not significantly slower than your
average Department of Motor Vehicles. It took a month for me to
get a very formal letter saying that my request had been received. In another month, I got another letter, in an envelope so thin that, like college application responses from high school days, I knew it had to contain disappointing news.

A search of our indices to the central records system as maintained by the Philadelphia Division revealed no record responsive to your FOIPA [Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts] request.

Although no record responsive to your request was located, we are required to inform you that you are entitled to file an administrative appeal, if you so desire …

The letter went on to tell me where to send the appeal, and how to address the envelope.

“I don’t understand,” my husband said. “What would you appeal? That you don’t have a file? ‘I demand that you start a file on me right this minute’?”

Evidently the FBI didn’t get very far with my colleague’s death threat, either. Since the bomb, our university library had stationed an elderly gentleman to laconically check the book bags of people entering. When I told him about the death threat, he
wasn’t even interested enough to look up from the sports page.

“Lotta crackpots out there,” he noted.

One friend said she would never have filed the FBI request, because I have probably alerted the FBI to investigate me now. But this friend thinks people hate her if she doesn’t hear from them for a couple of weeks, and also cleans up for her maid.

“Of course you don’t have a file,” my father remarked. “I probably have a file, though.”

I must say it is demoralizing, in middle age, to realize that your father’s life was racier than your own, more worthy of documentation. Now that my transgressions against the state come down to three unpaid parking tickets and a strong belief in a Republican conspiracy to make sure that whatever tax or health care reform legislation gets passed, I will always pay more, it is deeply cheering to think about a crackly black-and-white movie carefully preserved in a federal vault, of a younger me with longer hair and a more hopeful expression, necking with Yasha or Yuri, the very fate of the nation in my hands.