tel Adnan, the late Lebanese-American poet, writer, and painter, started a chapter of her short-story collection (2009) with the following question: “Why is it that when one has more past than future, life’s earliest memories acquire a frightful acuity? More and more I realize that my childhood and early adolescence surge in front of me too often, as if they have become a person—a different person each time—who stops me in the street, begs for something I don’t understand, and then disappears not behind some corner but into fog, oblivion.” In this short chapter,
