“Don’t get sucked in, Dave was always saying to me. Kind of like Helder’s container idea: Notice everything, but don’t buy into it. Hold it.”

“Writing a book is exactly like love. You don’t hold back. You give it everything you have. If it doesn’t work out, you’re heartbroken, but you move forward and start again anyway. You have to.You don’t hold some of yourself in reserve. It’s all or nothing. There are no guarantees. ”

“Helder said the goal of therapy was to make a container to hold all the disparate selves. I was going to need a big container. One that could hold hordes.”

“Diagnoses, Dave thought, were rough guesses, blunt tools, always more inaccurate than they were helpful.”

“You don’t have to have clarity,” he said, “to take a clear position.”

“I looked at the sofa. I wanted to lie down on it and close my eyes. I wanted him to just do the therapy to me, suck it out of me while I slept. I wanted a complete overhaul. I wanted new limbs. I wanted a new neck to hold up a whole new head. I wanted to be hypnotized, brainwashed, monitored, imploded, reconstituted, turned invisible. turned inside out, and cured. I wanted my organs replaced with all new organs, no scars. I wanted him to hover over me and infuse the stew of me with clear insights and shiny bits. I wanted all this change to happen while I lay semi-dozing, in a state of beauty and receptivity, quietly thrumming, on the couch. But it wasn’t a lie-down kind of a couch. It was a forward-facing, upright, massive ship of a thing – a sofa for adults, for work, for serious conversation, maybe for reading John Steinbeck or drafting torts. There had never been a free association on this sofa in its entire life.”

“Off and on for many years, I tried to write a book about my childhood. I’d bring chapters to workshop, to writing group, and I always got the same comments: How could you live this way? How could you survive this? It’s too raw. You don’t speak to these people, do you? I was deeply hurt by these reactions, and also confused. This was my mother. I loved her. This was my family. My life. How could it be too raw?”