My mother's name was Diana. She was not a good mother. I want to say that up front because the reflex, when a mother dies, is to sand down the rough edges and talk about her the way a eulogy talks about her. I cannot do that. Diana was a narcissist. That is not me being cruel — that is a word three different therapists used, independently, over the course of fifteen years. She was charming in public and eviscerating in private. She had a skill, honed over sixty-two years of practice, for finding the one thing you loved most about yourself and convincing you, through the precise application of criticism and withheld approval, that it was actually the worst thing about you. She did this to me, to my two sisters, to our father — who escaped by dying of a heart attack at fifty-one — and to every boyfriend I brought home between the ages of seventeen and twenty-nine. The only reason I had a wedding at all, the only reason I had a fiancé who was willing to marry into this family, was because I had spent five years of weekly therapy learning how to not let her destroy the things I loved anymore.