“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

for.

“When you left UVA, I thought you were throwing away the thing I never finished.”

She said it without the studied calm she usually brought to hard subjects. Just plainly, the way you say something when you have finally stopped editing it.

“I know that makes it sound like it was about me. It was partly. I left practice when you were born and told continue reading …