“No one asks to be born,” I grew up hearing Mildred Brewster say—to which my audibly breathing aunts, Abigail and Martha, would roll their eyes and breathe more heavily.

“The poor-Rachel routine,” Aunt Abigail labeled it.

“Here comes the whaling ship,” Aunt Martha would whisper in my ear, “just when we were hoping it had sailed beyond the horizon.” But I loved listening to Nana’s story about my mother’s name. Mildred Brewster had studied English and American literature at Mount Holyoke, a Massachusetts liberal arts college for women; her favorite novel was Moby-Dick, the reason my mom was named Rachel.

Nana’s copy of the novel was always on the table beside her reading chair. Even as a child, I noticed that Moby-Dick was a more constant presence than the Bible; my grandmother consulted the story of the white whale more than she turned to Jesus. “One day, dear, when you’re old enough, I’ll read this to you,” Nana told me, holding the huge book in both her hands. She didn’t wait for me to be old enough. I was ten when she started reading the novel aloud to me; I was twelve, almost thirteen, before she finished. It’s a slow novel, but the chapters are short. An ocean voyage goes slowly, except for the sinking.

“Keep your eye on the cannibal, dear—Queequeg is important,” Nana was always saying. “He’s not just any harpooner; Queequeg isn’t a Christian. He’s referred to as an ‘abominable savage’ for a reason—not only to get your attention. Queequeg travels with a shrunken head; he’s heavily tattooed. And there’s his coffin. Please don’t forget about Queequeg’s coffin!”

How could I forget a coffin? Listening to Moby-Dick made me anxious. I was relieved to discover that there was nothing abominable about Queequeg; Melville doesn’t even take him to task for not being a Christian. “For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal,” as Melville puts it. Listening to Moby-Dick—for close to three years—had a life-changing effect on me. It not only made me want to be a writer; according to my cousin Nora, it essentially shaped and screwed up the rest of my life.