author's note

 

This project started so long ago. Back then, up close, the material was too much, too tangled. With distance it distilled. I became more interested in the flashes and tastes than in the narrative of the story. Tolstoy jokes aside, I found that my family was like others: never immune to melodrama, even the most distasteful kind. Writers have a compulsion to arrange these things, to lay them out corpselike and fold the arms and button the collars. You take something you hate to see and you present it. The names have been changed. Everything has changed.

 

Amy Miller, 2016