“I dreamed that I woke up and there was a little girl, not more than three or four years old, standing outside my window in the snow. It was dark, and she was crying and afraid. There was something familiar about her, about her eyes. And then I realized they were my mother's eyes. It was my mother as a little girl standing in the snow, shivering and helpless, a pure human being before someone did to her what she had done to me. I had this inescapable sensation that someone had hurt her and continued to hurt her for a long time. More importantly, she had once been innocent.

I realized then that the difference between my mother and me was that I had had Myrtise, who for a few precious years held me and loved me, and my mother had had no one.

When I woke up, the world seemed in focus for the first time in my life. After years of haziness, I had crystal clarity.”