"Those were the years I developed my hunger for stories about the outer dark, that ether between where my body sat and my mind beheld. That’s when the love grew in me for tragic family histories my parents told and retold, stories that seemed to shift their mysteries depending upon what I yearned to hear - so that the sudden death of an infant was in one telling about a mother’s grief and in another about a premonition that was all but useless because it came too late"