Don’t Let Your Mother Answer for You
Not handwritten in a coffee shop while we talked.
Typed, printed, folded into thirds, and carried in a bag on the chance that a conversation went a particular way.
She told me afterward that she had written the first version of it on the twenty-sixth of December, the day after Christmas, and had revised it four times, and had shown it to exactly one person, who was her sister.
There were nine numbered items.