“‘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”

of families like mine, that the world was not large enough to prevent that kind of coincidence entirely.

What I hadn’t known was what it would feel like to have that operational life walk through the door in a serving dish carrying my sister’s casserole and sit down at the table. To have the two halves of myself—the one my family could see and the one continue reading …