May 19, 2020
The Mother of Reckoning
One of my mothers, I thought, could be dead.
Tracy O'Neill is the author of The Hopeful (2015) and Quotients (2020). She was a 2015 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a 2012 Center for Fiction Fellow. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, LitHub, BOMB, Narrative, Guernica, Bookforum, Vice, VQR, Austin Chronicle, and Catapult. She attended the MFA program at the City College of New York and the PhD program in communications at Columbia University.
The sentiment persists that scars construct character. I wish it were that easy.
That my brother and I were not white like the rest of my family didn’t seem to matter much. And then it did.
“You’ll feel like a baby,” she said. But I didn’t want to feel like a baby.
