I changed my name in October.

Not to Brooks. I want to explain that, because my father assumed Brooks and was visibly ready to be delighted about it, and I had to sit him down.

Brooks is also a man’s name. It’s his and it’s a good one and I love him, and I have been somebody’s daughter and then somebody’s wife and I have never in thirty-six years carried a name that was not assigned to me by a man I was attached to.

My mother’s name was Ines Vozniak.

She was born in Gdańsk and came over at nine and worked in hotel management for thirty-one years and bought a house on the water with her own money at forty-four, and she died when I was twenty-two, and she is mentioned exactly once in the entire account I wrote of the worst three years of my life — as a source of property.

I did that. Nobody else did that. I wrote a hundred pages about being erased and I gave my own mother one clause.