“So when I was in the middle of the lecture, reading the section where the lead character is having the argument with his alter ego about his mother, I realized for the first time that I wanted my mother to die.”

The interviewer looked uncomfortable.

“No, wait, listen,” I said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean that I wanted her to die, just to be gone. See, my mother was quite old at that time, she’d been extremely ill off-and-on for years, and in that eerie way we have of exchanging places with our parents when they grow old, I’d become the parent and she’d become the child; and I was responsible for her. I supported her, and tried to keep her comfortable down in Miami Beach where she was living, and that gave me pleasure, to play at being a real grownup son, and like that. But she was just a shadow. She hadn’t been happy in a long time, she was just marking out her days, and I wanted to be free of that constant realization that she was out there. I loved her, she was a nice woman. I didn’t have any rancor or meanness in me…I just had to admit that I wanted her gone.”

The interviewer looked really uncomfortable now.

“Well, oh boy, that was some helluva thing to have to admit to myself. ‘You slimy sonofabitch,’ I thought, and I was still reading aloud to the audience that had no tiniest idea what monstrous and hellish thoughts were tearing me up. ‘You evil, ungrateful, selfish prick! How the hell could you even consider something as awful as that? She never did anything to you, she raised you, put up with your craziness and always had faith in you when everyone else said you’d wind up in some penal colony or the chipmunk factory! You sleazy, vomitous crud, how can you even think of her being dead?’ And it was terrible, just terrible. I thought I was scum unfit to walk with decent human beings, to harbor these secret feelings about a perfectly innocent old woman. And I remembered what Eric Hoffer once wrote: ‘What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.’