At 2, I had no idea that my mother had a name of her own. Why would she need one? It wasn’t as if there was anyone else in our house who cooked eggy bread as a treat on Sunday mornings and who knew where the string and the Band-Aids were kept: Surely there could be absolutely no confusion at all. Nor did it seem likely that my mother had been something else, to someone else, before I was born. She, like all things animate and otherwise, owed her existence to me.

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“There's the cervix,” she said, as though I'd driven two hours to get the inside scoop on my cervix. “And there's the placenta.” She ran a computer curser over a fuzzy white mass.

But I wanted a profile or a full-body shot, some image that would tell my brain, Yes, there's a person in there, which would tell my heart, Yes, you can risk loving this person.

Right now it was still an it, and I still called it “Baby X.” Right now I still imagined a giant mathematical variable in my pelvis, offering a host of faceless unknowns.

But the tech held off on the print-worthy images and dwelled instead on organs. A flapping, four-chambered heart. A black marble of a spleen. Look, there's the brain: two hemispheres inside a globe.

Finally, the face. “There,” she said.

Except it was not the usual ultrasound profile of sloping forehead, dainty nose, and chin. It was a square shot, and I saw deep and ghostly eyeball cavities. The angular bone structure of the cheeks. A black opening for a mouth, gaping wide. It was a skull in my uterus. A Halloween icon floating in my womb.

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“Henry,” I said brightly. “Do you want to go to school?” Henry loves school. Although I was seething with frustration, I had read the parenting manuals that encourage a person in my situation to redirect a recalcitrant child by focusing on future rewards.

Henry nodded without much enthusiasm.

“You have to walk up the stairs to get to school,” I reminded him, firmly grasping his hand.

Reluctantly, he got to his feet and slowly climbed to the street, stopping emphatically on each step. At the top, he sat down again. An icy rain was starting to fall.

“Henry, we’re going to school! Remember?”

He shook his head, pulling his hand away. I pulled back more energetically, thinking about everything I had to do once I got to work. Henry lay down on the wet sidewalk.

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Korean children get a lot of fuss made over them, I guess because life was tough in the old country, and it was a big deal if you survived. There’s a big party thrown when you are 100 days old, followed by another when you make it to one whole year. My parents took a lot of pictures of me at these parties, although I don’t remember a thing as I was really drunk at both. From the pictures I see the cake, though — all these big multicolored rice cakes, each pastel stripe a steamed layer of pounded and steamed rice flour, not sweet like birthday cake but a delicious treat all the same. It looks like a chewy Neapolitan ice cream, or a gay pride flag made of carbs. It’s the best and I want it, but I think wanting that cake isn’t enough reason to have a baby.

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I was at work when the bomb went off. Everything on my desk shifted. In my naiveté, I wondered: Did one of the silos blow up? We turned on the news, and saw the chaos, the building torn away. I thought, “Thank God no one I love is in that building.”

My husband’s parents were taking care of Ashley that day. My husband’s father had an appointment at the Social Security Building at 9 o’clock, which I didn’t realize was in the federal building. When it finally sunk in what was happening, I collapsed in on myself. It’s a very hopeless feeling, not knowing.

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It began when I took my dog to the veterinary clinic where my wife works. At the time she was still in vet school and I was a first-time pet owner who’d chosen to spend most of my adult life responsible solely for my own fun and convenience. Archie, my dog, represented my first, hesitant step toward maturity. “He has a tick and I don’t know how to remove it,” I said to my future wife. Thankfully she pitied me, removed the tick, and thought I was cute enough to date. Three years later we got married with our dogs among the witnesses.

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I flew across the country and found her in what had once been called the music room, where she started sleeping once it became too difficult to climb the stairs. The cocktail bar was filled with her clothes and other necessities — diapers, a walker, a bedpan. The bed was where the piano used to be. I went over and took her hand. The skin on her face was sunken down around the bones and the skin on her arms fell off her in loose folds. “You look so thin,” I said.

“I know, darling,” she said, breathing raggedly. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

* * *

I was 19 when I started associating my worth with weight. It was summer, and I was living in my grandparents’ rickety beach house in Cape Cod.

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Plural marriage, as we call it, has always been a part of my life. From an early age, I understood my family was part of a peculiar group trying to live according to old Mormon ways. Both my grandfathers went to prison for polygamy, and I grew up hearing stories of their sacrifice for the “Principle.” We lived in a middle-class area of Salt Lake City, where most of our neighbors were mainstream Mormons (the church banned polygamy more than 100 years ago), and church representatives would show up and try to convert my father. All he had to say was “polygamy,” and they were gone.

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This is how my mother ends every email she sends me. Typed in italics and peppered with smiling emoticons, Mom’s electronic missives are as precious as she is — as earnest as the Empty Tomb Cake she bakes each spring on Good Friday. An edible replica of the cave where Jesus was buried after dying on the cross for our sins, the Empty Tomb Cake is the standard passion week centerpiece in my childhood home. It is frosted in gray, surrounded by a field of green coconut grass, and finished off with a Hostess Ding-Dong as the stone that was rolled away. On Saturday night, after everyone goes to bed, Mom steals into the kitchen under cover of night and rolls the Hostess Ding-Dong away from the door of the Empty Tomb Cake, then retouches the frosting. On Easter morning Jesus has risen — right there in the middle of the kitchen table.

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Cara refused to dress, so I made adjustments for the pictures that allowed for this. We wore identical long black cloaks. Cara buttoned hers over her nightshirt and pants, painted red lipstick on her mouth, pinked her cheeks. I copied her makeup, became her duplicate. We looked like old-fashioned harlots wearing long blank faces, in our long black coats. It was the middle of a harsh winter. I had a vision: identicals in the snow. I used the doppelgänger in the literary Gothic sense: landscapes were to describe the psychological state of the characters of our novel. It was easier for me to think of us as characters than to grapple with the truth of our new reality. I wanted Poe’s warring sisters, forever lost, women written with hysterical vapor. I wanted the fraction of history we owned.

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You can watch the show on Netflix now, or YouTube – which might not have been possible if it weren’t for the efforts of Andy Marx, the grandson of Groucho Marx. Andy’s a writer and photographer now. But in 1973 he was instrumental in saving this vital piece of Marxianna and Hollywood history from the garbage dump.

First question: How many people have tried out their Groucho Marx impression on you?

Oh my god, probably hundreds. There’s some legitimate ones that are good. I’ll be at lunch, and somebody will throw off some line or something, or they’ll try to relate a line of Groucho’s to whatever’s going on in the conversation.

At what point did you realize that your grandfather was Groucho Marx and what that meant?

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From the distant land called Washington, D.C., we’d heard the rumble of war-mongering getting louder every day. And now, the inevitable was upon us. For weeks, George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein had engaged in a stare-down contest. Neither one had blinked and now their eyeballs were all dried out, thanks to their resolve, hubris and, in at least one case, outright insanity. Bush had given Iraq a 48-hour warning, clicking a political stopwatch to life.

As the hour neared, there was something approaching a party atmosphere in the U.S. Army Alaska headquarters building where I worked. Voices rose in pitch. Tight laughter punctuated conversations. Senior officers swaggered down the hallways. At last, at last, all their military training would be put to good use.

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He was staying with our parents in the New York suburbs. On his laptop, he read the New York Times and flipped through our sister’s vacation photos. He corresponded with a mentor and asked potential landlords about on-street parking during his upcoming residency. On Wikipedia, he read about Baal Shem Tov, an 18th century Jewish mystic who our father says is our ancestor, and the pop-punk band Rancid, which rocked his adolescence. He searched for suicide notes and sites on famous last words and asked Google, “How many times does a human heart beat in a life?”

Anthony had a longtime fixation on losing his hair. In chat rooms he visited, balding men vented and swapped treatment tips. Anthony researched the effects of antidepressants and antidepressant withdrawal on hair loss. He read pages on Prince William – did balding “hasten his engagement?”—and a site called Baldcelebrity.com. Anthony was not noticeably balding.

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This was the opening sentence of a journal entry I wrote in my second grade Language Arts class, responding to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Each day of the school week, we were supposed to write in our journals, a minimum of a page, either in response to assigned prompts from our teacher, Mrs. McKierney, or through free writing at the start of class. We were encouraged to share our feelings and to say what was on our minds. The goal of the journals was to promote the act of writing, but my chief pastime as an 8-year-old boy was playing Nintendo, which didn’t require much capacity for language beyond dull grunts, hollers and the occasional curse word said under my breath when my mother was home or screamed when she wasn’t.

I had only written a few entries on the night before they were due for Mrs. McKierney’s monthly checkup. Watching TV in my bedroom, which is how I always did my homework, I wrote more than 20 of them, penning response after response to prompts such as “What will you do over spring break?” and “Write about your favorite hobby and why you love it.” My mother promised me a Nintendo game if I received an A, so I was motivated, even though anything school-related was worse than eating vegetables, something I often refused to do without bribery, too.

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Everyone said I "took after her," and I did. My features are more rounded than anyone else on either side of my family. Martha R. Stumm was the youngest of six surviving children of a Dutch-Irish-German couple who raised their family on a farm outside Tayorville, Ill. Years after her father died and her mother opened a boardinghouse in Urbana, enough oil was found beneath the land to make it worth drilling.

I visited the farm in the 1960s with my mom and dad, Aunt Martha and Cousin Bernardine from Stonington. It was a two-story frame house on a smallish footprint. Wallpaper was still hanging from the walls. They remembered their pony that lived in the barn, and they followed the path they ran on barefoot down to the river. Their dad was not only a farmer but ran a billiard parlor in Taylorville, and took out witty wisecracks in the classified section of the local paper.

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Nothing unusual except that in the middle of it, I found it physically painful to get out of bed. All day, going about my stay-at-home mom business, I cried. I cried while asking my kids if they wanted their morning bagels with cream cheese or peanut butter. I cried while driving them to school. I cried at the coffee shop where I go to write and in the dried foods aisle of Trader Joe’s. There was no sobbing, no blubbering or nose blowing, just a stream of tears stopping and starting all day long without any real cause.

My husband worried. My children were fussy and confused. And I couldn’t blame them. I knew exactly what they were going through, because long before I knew what depression was, before I’d ever heard of mood disorders or anxiety, I knew what it felt like to live with someone who was often, inconsolably, unhappy.

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I had just gotten a three-picture deal with Disney. Well, it wasn't really a three-picture deal. They hired me to write a script for one of their moronic ideas (Sinbad in the Army with dogs), and in the contract they locked me up for another two movies for slightly more money each time. But at the bottom of every page was writ in small letters: “We can terminate this contract for any reason at any time for perpetuity and eternity in this and every other conceivable universe and pay you NOTHING.” I asked my agent and she said I could tell everybody I had a three-picture deal with Disney. Even though I didn't really. And that, in a nutshell, is Hollywood, baby.

But the thought of telling the truth about myself made me hot and clammy, sticky and jittery, teeth tearing into cuticles till they bled. I was much more comfortable working on my buddy script about two 12-year-olds who go to Vegas and beat the mob. Or my mobster-becomes-a-vampire script. Or my “Some Like It Hot” cross-dressing baseball script.

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Graduate students streamed by us clutching coffee cups. "Finish up,” I chirped to the boys, who were stuffing their mouths with oatmeal cookie. The absurdity of the situation kicked my voice up an octave. “Now, who has to go potty?”

Like a lot of first-timers, my husband, Brian, and I went into parenthood with a plan. Ours was to give Jack an unhurried childhood (though Jack is not his real name). Both teachers, we distrusted the amped-up achievement culture in affluent communities like ours, with its tendency toward high-pressure schools, anxious parents and stressed-out kids. Yes to mud pies and bubbles, we vowed; no to flashcards and Brainy Baby preschools. What mattered was letting Jack figure out what he liked and helping him do that. “I don’t care if he ends up a surfer living out of the back of his van,” Brian said.

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On the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I heard an interview on “Fresh Air” that stopped me in the middle of my workday. Terry Gross was interviewing Carolyn Jones, a woman in Texas who had an abortion for reasons that sounded familiar.  She wanted her baby, just like I had wanted mine. Unlike me, though, she was forced to have an ultrasound and wait 24 hours because the lawmakers in her state had recently decided she should. She talked about how the doctor apologized for having to do it, how the nurse spoke louder and tried to distract her while the doctor verbally documented the ultrasound. She explained how the law required that the volume be up loud enough for her to hear the heartbeat.

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There was a lot of living between the silky Simone and the mangy mutt. It was mostly delicious, beaches and beds, reading out loud, laughter unspooling through the days. Even a shared stint of unemployment we spent traveling through Italy, slowing down in Florence so we could cook from the markets. Fava beans were in season. When we met, on a junket for journalists in the Bahamas, we were magazine editors living a continent apart. Kevin had read a feature I had written quoting one of his favorite Berkeley professors. He thought I was smart. So we began our relationship via email, Los Angeles to Vermont. It was always built on words. It wasn’t until he sent me a poem, the one about eating the plums, that I understood he was at least flirting with flirting.

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