“I had already gathered some of the intellectual and artistic tools that would help me navigate her death: black lipstick, the art of people who had just lived through the First World War, and a deeper sense of the Earth’s history as a series of apocalypses big and small, from extinction events to continents smashing into each other and creating mountain ranges. Each of these apocalypses had been both terrifying and world-making. I couldn’t imagine living after my mother died, but people did, it turned out; they lived through all kinds of things, things that changed them forever. This was the beauty and the horror at the heart of chaos. The ordered world I’d been promised if I was good enough turned out to be a lie. That realization was horrifying, but it also set me free in a way; if being a good girl couldn’t protect me from chaos, then maybe being good wasn’t the point.”