But I want to know, she said, why couldn’t it have been the same for my daughter? Why wasn’t I capable of giving her a childhood more like my own? And my parents, who played such a big part in her upbringing, my mother especially—why did the two of us grow up so unlike? I remember that as a kid I was tolerant, I was fair-minded. I liked everyone, I was never mean, I played well with others, I knew how to share, I knew how to listen. So why did I grow up to be so impatient? How often has it been said of me that I don’t suffer fools. And it’s true, I don’t, and it always made me proud to hear that. But when I think how uncritical and forgiving and coddling my parents always were—why was I, as an adult, as a parent, not like that too? And for all my love of school and fond memories of teachers, I myself hated teaching, I avoided teaching as much as I could, and whenever I did teach I was nothing like my old teachers, I was not a good teacher myself, I had no patience with students—just as I had no patience with my classmates in college and grad school, and as I’ve never had any patience with most of my colleagues. Cold. Intimidating. Condescending. Bullying. Professor from Hell. Bitch. Those were the kinds of things my students wrote about me in their course evaluations. And rather than care, I just stopped reading them. But now I can’t stop wondering, when I look back, when I remember my teachers, when I remember all that happiness and love, why did I myself scorn teaching my whole adult life?

I’m losing my voice, she said. (She had been talking nonstop for hours.) And you must be sick of hearing it.

I shook my head. In fact, I was riveted. Indeed, so riveted was my attention on her every word that it felt almost as if there were something indecent about it.

I don’t think I ever told you this story, she began one time. No, she hadn’t, but I knew it anyway, or at least the version of it that rumor had circulated. When she was still a teenager, her daughter had come between her and a man.