THE FAMILY'S WEATHER

There is a way of asking who am I that expects an answer shaped like an object — a thing to be found, once, and kept. This book was not written in that grammar. What follows proceeds instead from a different premise: that a self is closer to a rhythm than a fact — a pattern of return, audible only across time, recognizable only in its repetitions and their slow, resistant changes. Somewhere in these pages a voice will begin speaking in two registers at once: one built for rooms, one built for truth. Their distance from each other will not resolve into a single correct way of being. It will only, if this book has done its work, become visible. Read it for the story, if that is what you came for. The story will hold. But underneath it sits an older question, one this book stages rather than an-swers: what might be found, if the part of a person built for being watched were finally allowed to stop being the only part permitted to speak?