Not the freedom of cutting people off, which is loud and final and sometimes necessary, but the smaller, stranger freedom of staying at the table on terms that no longer cost you yourself.

Chapter 26 — Bring Your Own Plate

People ask me, when the story comes up — and it comes up, because stories like this travel — what the lesson was.

They want a single clean sentence they can carry home and apply to their own difficult tables.

For a long time I didn’t have one, because the truth was too tangled to fit on a magnet.

But I have one now, worn smooth by a year of turning it over.