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I’ve learned how to be a penetrating interviewer because I’ve got the two things a good interviewer needs: curiosity and patience.
    I didn’t know I was good at it until I got thrown into interviewing two years ago as a freshman during flu season, which wiped out the entire staff of the Long Wharf Academy
Advocate
, including Lizzie Pucciari, an assistant editor who was coughing so bad she couldn’t take notes. But the paper had to come out and Mr. Leopold, the school newspaper’s advisor, asked me if I would interview the new Dean of Students, McAlaster Proust. Everyone knew Mr. Proust had cancer the year before, but no one ever mentioned it, like saying the word could be catching. Lizzie, from her sick bed, told me to ask him the usual stuff—where he went to school, what were his hobbies, how long had he been working in education—but I wanted to know what the cancer had taught him. I figured if it hadn’t taught him anything, the school was in trouble. So I asked him. And you know, he leaned back in his chair and talked for an hour about how scared he’d been and how having something like cancer puts everything in perspective. He felt he’d been given a second chance and he had an urgency to reach out to students and show them how to celebrate life. I mentioned that less homework might be one of the ways that all the students could celebrate life more fully, and he laughed and said he’d take it under advisement.
    I called the interview “From Disease to Enlightenment,” and the school secretary, Mrs. Fusser, hugged me in the hall and told me about her mother’s fight against cancer and how she had beaten it just like Mr. Proust had. Mrs. Fusser was going on and on about what an excellent interviewer I was. It’s a gift, I told her. You’ve got to get behind a person’s public mask to find the real humanity.
    I’m told my mother knew how to do that, even during her long bout with cancer. Tib said no one in this world fought harder to live than my mom. People would come to visit her at the hospital to cheer her up and she ended up helping them with their problems. That’s a social worker for you. I wish I had more personal memories of her. I have all her jewelry in a safe. I have the letter she wrote to me before she died that was dictated to a nurse about how she loved me and the riches she hoped life would bring. She wanted me to know that the absolute hardest part about dying was leaving me so young. She said history has proved that women can do anything. She said she had much more to tell me, but was getting tired and would finish the letter later. She never finished it; she died the next day. We called it “the unfinished letter” and like an unfinished symphony, it bore the sadness of death that had come in the middle of something instead of at the end.
    I listened to the roaring rhetoric coming from the living room. Uncle Whit was loudly debating a point on the economy and used FDR’s New Deal as an example. I walked over. I wanted to mention that the strength of the New Deal was that President Roosevelt realized that no one big plan could help the country—it had to be a string of little plans hitting America’s problems on all fronts to boost the economy. I tried making my point, but no one heard me. I waited until there was a lull in the conversation, but Breedloves forsake breathing when they talk. I even tried raising my hand, but I didn’t get called on.
    Then I did what I always do at family gatherings—curled up in the reading nook with a fat history book.
    “Just like Josephine,” Fiona whispered to Archie. “Ivy cloistered over there like she was better than all of us.”
    At the mention of Josephine, several Breedloves within earshot sucked in air. Thankfully, my father hadn’t heard. In this family, being like Josephine isn’t a compliment. This wasn’t the first time we’d been compared.
    Josephine is my aunt, and Dad and Archie’s sister who disappeared years ago. The