Dottie must have liked Molly’s epithet for my awful aunts—stupid as skiing on bare ground was understandable in Maine.

In my imagination, I would denigrate and kill off no end of awful aunts in future novels and screenplays—a “fink of womanhood,” I would label one such disapproving and frosty soul. She was known to put down couples who lived together as man and wife—either if they weren’t married, or if (in this imperious aunt’s unflagging judgment) they shouldn’t be.

I pitied my fictional uncles, too. “As for Uncle Bob,” I would write, “there were times when living with my aunt Muriel must have resembled a religious observance—the kind of demanding devotion that fasting requires, or perhaps a nocturnal trial (such as staying up all night, when going to bed would be both customary and more natural).” Poor Muriel. I would kill her off in a car crash:

“The car, which my aunt Muriel had been driving, was hit head-on by a drunk driver who had strayed into Muriel’s lane,” I wrote. I didn’t give her a chance to survive “the carload of partying skiers.”

As for my fictional mothers—oh, boy. Where to begin? When to stop? No, I didn’t write about Little Ray; she was right not to see herself among my made-up moms. But I would write about my mother’s circumstances, and mine.

Molly told me that my mom really hated this passage: “Even if my father’s identity and his story were painful to my mother—even if their relationship had been so sordid that any revelation of it would shed a continuous, unfavorable light upon both my parents—wasn’t my mother being selfish not to tell me anything about my father?”

“There was nothing sordid!” my mom said to Molly. “I’m not selfish, am I, sweetie?” my mother asked me.

And there was this passage—again, I thought, faithful to the situation between us but not intended as a portrait of her (Molly assured me that Little Ray had hated it): “One day, I always thought, she would tell me about it—when I was old enough to know the story. It was, apparently, the kind of story you had to be ‘old enough’ to hear.”

My mom didn’t use Molly as an interpreter to let me know how she felt about this passage: “I was aware that my mom was pretty, and I was increasingly conscious of how the other students at an all-boys’ academy regarded her.”

“You know how boys are, sweetie. I can’t help it that I’m pretty, can I?” was all my mother said to me about it.

It’s hard to know what I might have written about my mom and Matthew Zimmermann—I mean, if Zim had actually married an older woman who resembled Little Ray, or if there’d been anything of an actual nature between them.