I've never felt more important than when I lived in New York. I was poor and my work was neither very good nor very well-read, and yet every day I'd wake up in my 10-by-10 room, its window looking out over my building's rusted trashcans, and somehow think I'd achieved another great victory.

For four years, my mother had a crippling fear of death. It started during her first bout with breast cancer. While recovering from her mastectomy, she insisted on driving my father to and from work, so that if he died in a car accident she'd be there to say good-bye. Nobody in our family was allowed to drive in bad…