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couples, my mother and father could not tell a story about their shared past without arguing about which street corner they had been standing on. Once, during a particularly drunken dinner with the writers Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster, Siri attempted to diffuse an argument between them with an anecdote of her own.
    â€œOne morning in the country, while Paul was still sleeping, our daughter and I saw a bird—it was a vision—through the window. A heron, majestic. I held her and we watched it in silence,” Siri said. “Later, I overheard Paul tell the story at a party—but now he had seen the heron. He had held Sophie. I hadn’t been there at all! Because of course we had told him all about it.”
    â€œI really thought I had seen it,” Paul said with a gravelly laugh, an open sweep of the cigarillo in his hand.
    â€œAnd I believe him,” Siri said, leaning forward, her blue eyes wide and earnest. “And it doesn’t matter. The point is: the heron was seen.”
    I served myself again from the Chinese takeout cooling on the table, even though I was no longer hungry. My mother was the only other one still eating. She never ate, then she ate like a wolf. I put the food in my mouth without tasting it.
The heron was seen.
How blissful to be able to find that kind of peace with the past.
    â€œI have a terrible memory,” my mother said then. She sounded tipsy, which surprised me. She drank wine every night, but she rarely got drunk. “All of my memories,” she continued morosely, “all of my memories have my children in them. Even the ones from before they were born.”
    â€œSo your life began twenty-three years ago,” Paul said. That was my age at the time.
    â€œI guess so,” my mother said.
    â€œBut that’s very sweet,” Siri said.
    â€œIs it?” my mother said. “It seems a bit sad to me.”
    But I do not think my mother meant that she remembered only her life after my birth. I think she meant what she said: that we were in all of her memories, even though we could not be. The narratives were part of my mother’s power. The past shaped the present, but the present also reshaped the past.
    â€”
    O UR REL ATIONSHIP CHANGED abruptly when I went away to college. It was as if my mother had been molding me my whole life, and now suddenly she stepped away, as if I were complete, as if sheliked what she saw. The absence of her anger terrified me as much as the anger itself had. I still felt far from complete. The year I left, my mother added a second full-time job to her first. She began her own children’s book publishing company in the ground floor of our building. She told me she knew my brother would be leaving a too-short four years later, and she refused to allow her life to feel empty without us. She made time for me whenever I called but very rarely called me first. Sometimes we went two months without speaking. I felt the free-floating horror of freedom. It took two years before I stopped jumping up from my seat in my too-quiet dorm room, hallucinating her screaming my name.
    My junior year, I moved off campus at the last minute and found myself in an apartment with no furniture. The school year hadn’t yet begun, and other people’s parents were driving them to Ikea in their SUVs. I called my mother in a panic.
    â€œWhat do I do? I don’t even know where to start!” I said.
    â€œYou figure it out, Nadja,” she said. She was busy, she had deadlines, she had an artist sitting in her office. “It’s not that hard. You don’t need much.”
    â€œBut where will I sleep tonight? How does one even buy a mattress?” I said.
    â€œI don’t know,” she said. “Borrow an air mattress. Sleep on the floor a few nights. I have to go.” I wound up on a friend’s doorstep in hysterical, self-serious tears. The next weekend, my mother stopped by on her way to the country.