A Lot Of My Upbringing Was About

She Had Listened To Him, Partly Sympathetic, Partly Horrified. For It Was One Thing For Her To Reject Her Background, To Be Critical Of Her Family's Heritage, Another To Hear It From Him.

If I Stop To Think About Fans, Or Best-selling, Or Not Best-selling, Or Good Reviews, Or Not-good Reviews, It Just Becomes Too Much. It's Like Staring At The Mirror All Day.

In The Days That Follow, He Begins To Remember Things About Moushumi, Images That Come To Him Without Warning While He Is Sitting At His Desk At Work, Or During A Meeting, Or Drifting Off To Sleep, Or Standing In The Mornings Under The Shower. They Are Scenes He Has Carried Within Him, Buried But Intact, Scenes He Has Never Thought About Or Had Reason To Conjure Up Until Now.

Ive Inherited A Sense Of That Loss From My Parents Because It Was So Palpable All The Time While I Was Growing Up, The Sense Of What My Parents Had Sacrificed In Moving To The United States, And Yet At The Same Time, Building A Life Here And All That That Entailed.

The Urge To Convert Experience Into A Group Of Words That Are In A Grammatical Relation To One Another Is The Most Basic, Ongoing Impulse Of My Life.