LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      One of my favorite books is Caught in the Web of Words, Elizabeth Murray’s loving memoir of her grandfather, James A. H. Murray, who created the Oxford English Dictionary. I’d like to steal her title for a memoir of my own life. Among my earliest memories, besides proudly displaying a bleeding toe when I was three—proof in my mind that I belonged with the big children—or enraging my mother by washing off my first beloved pair of red shoes under the garden hose—are books, words, the smell of new books, which to me still heralds the excitement of the first day of school.

      My older brother Jeremy taught me to read when he started school. I was about four, but I don’t remember learning. I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. Jeremy was my first and always my best teacher, patient beyond belief (until the time came when I couldn’t understand his explanation of fractions). He taught me to write, as well. When I was five and he was eight, we wrote plays that we put on for the other kids on our street.

      I kept writing, all through my childhood and adolescence, stories, the occasional poem. Somehow I never wrote any other plays.

      Jeremy and I read aloud to each other when we were teenagers. One summer we covered all of Shaw’s plays; another time, we sang all of Gilbert & Sullivan to each other.

      When Jeremy and I were responsible for washing all the dishes for our family of seven, we played word games or sang duets while we cleaned up. He’s smarter than me and has always had a bigger vocabulary, so I started making up words to even the gap; he could never be certain whether to challenge me or not—if the word was in Webster’s, I won, if not, he did. Creating uncertainty was my only weapon, and perhaps that sharpened my powers of invention.

      My brother is a gifted linguist (he speaks eleven languages and reads fifteen); one year he added French lessons to the dishwashing hour. I used to look forward to washing up. After he left for college, the chore became just that, a dull chore. I hate it to this day.

      While my older brother and I read together, my next brother, Dan, and I acted out dramas. Sometimes we emulated our three military uncles by acting out the Korean or Second World Wars; at other times we were Scotland Yard Detectives. My two youngest brothers, Jonathan and Nicholas, were so very much younger than I that we didn’t often play together, but our time together was very important; I was to all intents their surrogate mother when our mother’s life became too difficult for her to deal with and she withdrew into a private hell (when they started school, they didn’t know I was their sister—they thought they had two mothers).

      Before that time, our mother was an inventive storyteller. She had two long-running serials that she created for my younger brothers while she ironed. As a child, she had adored the Tom Mix movies, and she spun those into new versions, starring my brothers. I sometimes eavesdropped, spellbound by her tales.

      Perhaps it doesn’t seem surprising that I became a writer, but it was, in fact, a difficult journey. This memoir traces the long path I followed from silence to speech, and the ways in which my speech has been shaped by what I’ve witnessed along the way. The book deals with the dominant question of my own life, the effort to find a voice, the effort to help others on the margins find a voice, the effort to understand and come to terms with questions of power and powerlessness. My husband says I am a pit dog, that I will go into the ring against anyone, as long as they are at least five times my size. I will turn sixty soon, but I still haven’t figured out when it’s time to walk away from a Goliath.

      I have four brothers in all, three younger than I.¹ We had a childhood together that was rich in many aspects, but was also marred by the serious violence in our household. Like many violent families, we imploded on ourselves; it was hard for most of us to reach out and become connected to the larger world. My brothers are all interesting people, gifted in many ways, but it would be wrong of me to tell their stories for them, so as much as possible I have tried not to present anecdotes in which they were the key players.

      I was born in Ames, Iowa, where my father was completing his PhD in bacteriology. He was a New Yorker, a City College man, but for a time in the thirties and forties, Iowa State College became home to some of the most gifted biochemists of the twentieth century as Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe found a home there. My father’s City College professors sent him to Iowa to study with these brilliant scientists. My mother had also gone to Iowa for graduate study; she and my father met there as students.

      My father was drafted shortly after they married. He spent the Second World War in the Pacific theater; she worked for a short time in New York, living with his family, then spent the rest of the war years with her mother and her new baby, my brother Jeremy, in downstate Illinois. In 1951, my father took a position in the Bacteriology Department at the University of Kansas. My mother did not finish her advanced degree in science, nor did she work outside the home until much later in her life, when she became the children’s

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