My own family said it, and the guests at the banquet said it with their eyes, and some part of me, trained for two years to keep the peace, said it too, in the small hours, when I doubted myself. You are the one destroying this family. And for a while it was the hardest thing to bear, because I did not want to destroy anything; I had spent two years trying desperately to hold a family together.

But I understand now that the accusation rests on a lie about what a family is, and that seeing through the lie is the whole liberation.

The people who accused me of destroying the family were calling family a particular arrangement of people — a household, a marriage certificate, a set of holiday gatherings, an image.

And by that definition, yes, I destroyed it; the gatherings ended, the marriage dissolved, the image shattered.

But that arrangement was never a family.