In choosing the short stories gathered here I couldn’t help but be reminded of Aristotle’s prescriptive elements for drama: a protagonist, an antagonist, and a complicator. The reader of these stories might also note that Aristotle could have been writing as well about a three-person family: mother, father, and one child. This, of course, was the underpinning of my family’s drama where Aristotelian lessons played out, lessons reinforced for me later in literature and on the proper stage in the plays of Ibsen, O’Neil, and Miller featuring conflicted families.

Every day we have the opportunity to narrate  some truth about our lives. Throughout this collection, I have tried to focus on the gaps in our personal histories to the end that  their discovery might lead to seeing ourselves and our families with humility and compassion. And sometimes with humor.