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Sheila: You give me too much credit, Perr. I didn't invent myself. I stumbled upon myself. Desperation and fear started me as a child thinking that I had to escape my surroundings and drove me out of my parents' house and into my life.

I began to realize when I was very young that I would not survive in the bitter conflict that was my parents' marriage. Imagine a home where the adults never say a kind word to each other. D. H. Lawrence has a wonderful story in which the walls continually whisper, "There must be more money!" Our walls shouted it. Imagine a New York slum flat with no heat of any sort in winter and no ice to keep food from spoiling in summer, an unhappy overworked mother who (forgive me for this harshness, but that was how I thought of it) never shut up about how badly she had married and how her three children added to her misery by being noisy, dirty, careless — by being children. A scraped shoe, a torn dress, an injury in some game brought forth wrath and punishment. She hit me till I hit her back, and then she stopped.

I was basically by temperament a happy kid, I think, but my childhood seemed designed to make me feel unworthy of anything.

To be fair to my mother, she worked endlessly to keep us fed and clothed and healthy and Jewish and, hardest of all, to make us seem respectable. It was this last heroically impossible effort that was most destructive. Everyone knew we were poor, and she minded terribly.

I looked around me at the adults in my life and noted that most of them were unhappy. I read a lot and loved fiction and drama and poetry. I saw a few movies. I began to dream of other people's kind of lives. My aunt Amy was my most successful relative; she was a public school gym teacher, having put herself through training school. Her job held even through the Depression, when my father — and everyone else — was out of work. I didn't admire or even like her, but I've wondered if she was the model who led me to teaching or at least to the vision of a secure civil service job as the ultimate paradise.

As soon as I could, I got out. I ran away once, when I was a high school junior, then I left permanently when I was a college freshman. I never lived at home again. I had two siblings, both unhappy as well. My sister quit high school to work in a factory, then married a neighborhood boy to get out of that house. And my brother ran away at sixteen, enlisted in the army, and was killed in the Korean War. Our living conditions were unlivable.

I found my way because I was desperate and because I was lucky. I came upon sympathetic people and unearthed oddball jobs. I took the entrance exam and qualified for Brooklyn College — an absolutely free public college. I started college, I moved out of my parents' house — and I loved every minute of this new life. The first taste of it was enough to nourish the dream through all the hard work and waiting. Happiness and beauty beckoned.

And Perri, just as you give me too much credit, you give yourself too little. Sure, you grew up in a middle-class suburb, in an academic home of modest income, but you made good choices. And what makes you think you were such a good girl? You were not an easy teenager. You wanted independence and privacy and freedom. It was hard for us, and it was not an easy time for any parents, I don't think. All around us, your contemporaries in that same middle-class suburb were getting stoned on drugs. Don't you remember that a couple of nice good kids you knew and liked in your high school actually died? And then there were the kids who grew into chronic shoppers fascinated by the New Jersey malls or turned into mindless jocks. We were afraid for you.

The seventies were a restless, frightening time, yet you kept your head. You chose books, you chose medicine, you chose writing. Suddenly you wanted to go into New York on your own. Not to buy drugs or hang out in Times Square, but to study Arabic and Hebrew. It meant letting you go by yourself into the city on the bus several times a week for classes, which was worrisome, but we let you, and you did it. Suddenly you wanted to volunteer to work with recovering addicts. You came home from those meetings stinking of cigarette smoke because the addicts smoked compulsively; you've always detested that smell. Suddenly you wanted to spend a whole adolescent summer volunteering on the hospital ship that gave slum kids free physicals. Superb choices.

You wore incredible clothing — the same torn jeans and T-shirts for years, it seemed to me, and you made your hair as wild as you could. It was a kind of uniform for you and your friends. You hated your high school and balked at going. As in my own life, luck intervened; our town, Leonia, started an alternative high school. You breezed through it in three years and were off to college at sixteen. You finished high school and went off to college and almost immediately met Larry, and the two of you began to work out your own destinies independent of the Jersey suburbs from whence you came.

I'm not clever enough to figure what we each could have been in other lives. You were smart and strong, and I think you would have made your way, but it would probably have been a very different way. Me? Who knows? I might have been Leo Tolstoy, after all. But I might have been an inveterate mall shopper. Both possibilities entertain me.

I do believe that a combination of factors determine our destinies. I ran away from home into a babysitting job with kind people who fostered my dreams of college and becoming a writer. My kid brother ran away and joined the army, where he managed to finish high school, and was making himself a good life when the Korean War broke out. He died at seventeen during the second week of the war.

I have always been a worrier, apprehensive and afraid of what might happen in any new situation. Papa, on the other hand, equally concerned and capable of more terrible mental scenarios than I, somehow managed to muster the strength to keep us all going. He had utter confidence in your good sense and judgment, and he reassured and encouraged me.

If I ever did any brave thing, I did not do it bravely, but desperately.

How and why we are who and what we are is a great mystery. It is perhaps what makes writing fiction so fascinating because an author is constantly seekng reasons for the way her characters behave and coherent explanations for what finally happens to them. In real life, of course, there may not be reasons we can see, or coherent explanations — and when we look back and try to construct them, we are partly explaining what happened and partly making up stories.

Copyright © 2006 by Perri Klass. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Motherhood

About the Author

Perri Klass, M.D., is pediatricians on the staff of Boston University School of Medicine. Harvard graduate who trained in pediatrics at Boston Medical Center and Boston Children's Hospital, she has practiced pediatrics at Dorchester House, a community health center in Boston, for ten years. Klass writes frequently for The New York Times, and is a contributing editor at Parenting. She has written both fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Other Women's Children and the memoir Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician's Training.

About the Author

Sheila Solomon Klass is the author of sixteen novels, including In a Cold Open Field, and a memoir. She recently retired from her position as an English professor at Manhattan Community College, CUNY. She lives in Manhattan.