Frederick Weisel

In March of that year, I saw a man named Paul Barkley shot to death. It happened late at night in the parking lot of a café in Santa Rosa called Galileo__.

Of course, when you fall out of love, it__ rarely about just one failure or one betrayal, is it? . . . How does it happen? All those things you once loved about each other are replaced by other things that remind you of something you hate until you__e always setting each other off, and what you share is a battleground. In the end, the failure turns out to be less about sex__hich surprises most men__nd more about loss of respect. One morning your partner looks at you across the bed and wonders at the waywardness of her own heart__ow, she asks herself, can she feel such disdain for someone she once felt such love?

What spares us is memory,_ he said. __t__ what makes us worth saving. However low we sink, whatever promise we no longer fulfill, we tell our stories. That__ why you__e so important, Charlie. You__e a guardian of our national memory.

The problem with escaping is that we leave behind us, even among those we love, different versions of the truth and everything we couldn__ bring ourselves to say.

People are complicated,_ she said. __idn__ they teach you that in biography school?

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words.

If they__e together long enough, every couple has one conversation over and over. This was ours.

Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing__scape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you__l find a compulsion to flee__ seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores. _ Teller: A Novel

At first, he talked about the flowers in the garden behind his country house in Surrey. His voice still had its Midlands accent but was soft now and barely audible. He knew the plants by name and took a few minutes with each of them: ageratum, coreopsis, echinacea, rudbeckia. The yarrow, he said, had rose-red flowers on two-foot stems. Achillea millefolium, the plant Achilles used to heal wounds.

Over the years, Skye sampled every drug she could find, and like many addicts, had a working knowledge of pharmacology. She snorted coke and swallowed pills. She took downers__range and red Seconal, red and ivory Dalmane, Miltown, Librium, Luminal, Nembutal, and Quaaludes. Blue devils, red birds, purple hearts. Enough of them sank her in a kind of coma, where she watched her own limbs suspended in front of her in syrup. For a party, there was Benzedrine, rushing in her veins and making her talk for an hour in one long sentence. Day to day, she carried yellow tablets loose in her pockets, Dilaudid and Percodan, and chewed them in the back of classrooms. But her favorite was the greatest pain reliever of them all, named for the German word for hero.

Take a seat, Charlie,_ he said. ____l kill you in a few minutes. It__l be good for you.

Aren__ autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don__ we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.