Three generations of women experience their gravity

AN ESSENTIAL debut from an astonishing new voice, Confessions traces the arc of three generations of women as they experience in their own time the irresistible gravity of the past, of love and tragedy, of memory and redemption, and, in all things intended and accidental, the beauty and terrible shade of the things we do.

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WORRYING about my father is one of my clearest childhood memories. Well, actually, witnessing my mother worrying about my father after the World Trade Center bombings in 1993. He was fine, obviously, but my mother was frantic waiting for him to call.

The memory is specific not because I really understood what was going on, but because it was the first time I was fully conscious of trying to stay calm for the sake of my mother, as she paced up and down beside the phone in our apartment.

I stood, still as a statue, out of her way, staring at the hour hand on the clock in the kitchen, trying to catch it moving.

My mother suffered from agoraphobia, hypochondria, paranoia. Because she didn't like to leave the apartment much, my father and I would go off on trips — just the two of us, walking. Shed fret that it wasn't safe.