The house next door went up in smoke and flames one night ten or fifteen years ago - defective wiring - and where it stood there is a two-story apartment house that covers half of what used to be our side yard. Here and there all over town big old houses are missing, or between two old houses that have survived somebody has inserted a new house, spoiling my recollection of things. When I come upon the new hospital I totally lose my bearings. Where exactly was the little grocery store my mother used to send me to when she discovered she was out of rice or butter or baking soda? And which wing of the hospital has obliterated the huge bed of violets in the back yard of the house where old Mrs. Harts lived with her son Dave, who never married? And was the bed of violets huge only because the child who once a year knocked on the back door and asked for permission to pick them was so small?

When it was decided (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all supposed to choose between fiction and nonfiction, what was not taken into account was that for some of us truth can never be an absolute, that there can (at best) be only less true and more true and sometimes those two collapse inside each other like a Turducken. Given the failure of memory. Given the failure of language to mean. Given metaphor. Given metonymy. Given the ever-shifting junction of code and context. Given the twenty-five people who saw the same car accident. Given our denial. Given our longings.

…

Who cares really, if she hung herself or slit her wrists when what really matters is that James Fry is secretly afraid that he’s the one who killed her. Dear Random House Refund Department: If they were moved, then they got their twenty-four dollars worth.

I suppose it could also be said we’re known to the extent that we’re dull and orbital about our life, that what’s quotidian about us is more easily shared than the exuberances and passions that push us out of the predictable.

[…]

Then I go back to considering the love angle, how it’s nearly impossible to convey our deepest passions yet damned easy to share what’s dullest and worst about ourselves.

It wasn’t that we had no respect for human life. We all felt that human life was an important thing, probably sacred, but it seemed that you had to allow for certain mitigating circumstances. And anyway, said Eugene, steadying himself against the grill, shouldn’t human life always come second to human ideas, which are the closest we can get to immortality? Then he threw up a little bit and we all had to lie down.