It had taken me thirty-two years, a bruised shoulder beneath a blue silk dress, and a ballroom full of witnesses to understand, all the way down, what she had meant.

Chapter 22 — Real Power Doesn’t Need an Audience

I thought a great deal, in those months, about my mother’s phrase, because the ballroom had been, by any measure, an audience, and I did not want to have misunderstood her at the very moment I was trying to honor her.

But I came to see that she had not been warning me against ever standing on a stage.

She had been warning me against needing one.