Medicine and time alone wouldn’t restore the factory settings. I had to. That was that. For the past three years, I’d made his mood and survival my personal goalpost, with daily letters and weekly visits, first to the prison hospital and rehab, then prison, refusing to miss once, not even the time that I had a fever so high I hallucinated a herd of elk crossing the road. I just needed a lever and a place to stand.

Getting what you wanted, I always thought, was just a matter of setting your eyes on the prize and refusing to surrender. The fictional women of romantic literature that I taught in my classes never seemed particularly over-the-top to me. Emma and Cathy and Lily Bart just didn’t take no for an answer. Of course, I understood intellectually that ambitious people could sometimes make a very hard landing. But I didn’t feel that. What I felt was insulted even at the idea of accepting defeat. I guess that came from my father, who bucked the odds all his life.

My parents gave us a good life, as owners of a successful stationery store in Arcadia, a ritzy little suburb north of Milwaukee. But there were few extras for my sisters Amelia and Phoebe or me. I worked in the store from the age of fourteen and then, during summers in college, I worked the overnight shift at a local paper factory, cleaning the slurry out of the machines. It was disgusting, backbreaking work, and probably dangerous despite the mask and protective suit I wore. But the factory paid well, although it took what seemed like a month every fall for me to get the paper residue out of my hair. In truth, I probably really didn’t need to work those jobs. But both my folks were disposed to think of diligence, even a little desperation perhaps, as good for building character. As tired as we got of hearing his origin story, our dad never got tired of telling it.