“I loved the idea of a subversive world where mental illness was defined as just another version of normal, and education was how you made your way in the world, not something that began or ended.”

“Mental illness didn’t really change people. It just made them more of who they were going to be anyway. Mental illness was less like obliteration, more like italics.”

“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?”

“How, I asked, could I have gone my whole life not knowing about my mother? How could I have not known what Keith knew when he saw our house? “It’s your mom,” Helder said. “Because it’s Mom.” He sounded firm and knowing and clear. “When a child has an alcoholic father, he sees him drink all day long but he doesn’t have a label, a concept. You just know that at night, when the tires make a certain sound in the driveway and the doors slam a certain way, with a certain sound, you just know you need to hide.”

“I’d set out to write a book about how we learn to trust our own experience in the face of confusion, doubt, and anxiety. What I ended up with is the story of how we love each other in spite of immense limitations”

“I truly missed my parents. I wanted to miss them. It was the only way I could love them, a crazy cocktail of longing and pretending and absence and hope.”

“Find ways to develop self-awareness so you know what you do well... you do a thousand things brilliantly, and if you don't know what they are you aren't going to be able to become a true evaluator of your own work or other people's.”