But he and his siblings agreed: you could not call a marriage of forty-seven years a failure simply because it was unoriginal.

Then, one by one, like mourners at a funeral, each of them shuffled up and shook my hand, some saying nothing

but looking deep into my eyes, theirs glistening in the autumn light.

This book is not a complete autobiography; it does not tell the whole life or attempt to explain everything. It is a description of psychosis, a break from reality, and the memories it contains represent paths back to that reality, to the “historical time” the patient has departed.

I stayed home for days with weekend drives
   to see my love,

   who didn’t live with me.

We never really talked about that day afterward, my father and I, the way we don’t talk about his childhood. I wonder if he remembers it today and if so, how.

Sometimes, she thinks, memory lodges in the body. She’s always suspected that people have been wrong about the brain, about the flashes of light and color sparking in its folds, compressed by hard skull. Memory travels down arms and legs familiar with the dance, under the arch of the spine or the foot. The body remembers.

*I can’t breathe* in the water’s curve and slur
Over the narrow paths, in the trail and gutter
His body made in the mud, where the sky
Barges in and fills.

I believe that the arc of the universe can be bent toward justice, but it does not happen by itself. History is not inevitable. It is the result of choices that people make, and decisions that institutions embrace.

You could say that Wayward is a novel about rage and despair, which are two sides of the same coin; as well as privilege and risk, which are the same side of two different coins. It’s a novel about who gets to choose the conditions of their existence, and what it means—indeed, whether it is possible—to reject the “choices” that have been made for you.