He accepted that, in the way children accept things, which is completely and provisionally.

Part Seventeen: My Mother, Two Years On

I have not spoken to my mother in two years and nine months.

People find that harder to hear than anything else in this story, including the letter, and I have stopped being surprised by it.

There is something about a man not speaking to his elderly mother that lands in people’s chests in a way that seven years of a stolen childhood somehow does not, and I have watched perfectly decent people hear the whole account, agree that it was monstrous, and then say, within about four minutes, “But she’s seventy, Ivan.”

So I want to put down what has actually happened rather than the version people expect, which is either a reconciliation or a cutting-off, and it is neither.