“In fact, this was exactly how I felt about my own first childhood home, which remained more clear in my memory, more real, than anywhere I had lived since. Those first ten years of life, in which I had so exhaustively explored my surroundings, had given me a depth of useless knowledge, made me an expert in the geography and furnishings of the house at 4534 Waring Street, Houston, Texas, between the years 1952 and 1963. I supposed that other people—unless, like my first husband, they’d moved house every year or two—carried around with them a similarly useless mental floorplan and inventory—but until now I’d never heard anyone else talk about it.”