One afternoon, after my mother had fallen ill for the fourth or fifth time, I pulled out all my eyelashes, one by one. I was thirteen. She had gone to the hospital in the middle of the night with my stepfather—a psychiatrist, but not hers—and after I came home from school that day, nothing was ever the same. In 1970, we lived in a partially renovated loft in a downtown Manhattan factory building. It wasn’t the kind of SoHo loft that in a few years would be featured in Architectural Digest and sell for fifteen million. Our place featured scarred wooden floors and frayed burlap curtains that couldn’t hide the peeling paint and drafty wood-framed windows overlooking a commercial bakery where pies and cakes sailed down conveyor belts all night long. Extension cords snaked through the 3600 square feet of wide-open space that was strewn with disorderly piles of books, toys, and lumber and building supplies for the never-ending renovations my stepfather was too busy to finish. Stacks of my mother’s violin and viola music were toppling over on the piano lid. Her music stand was covered in sooty grit that fell from the ceiling beams whenever the upstairs neighbors walked on their floor.

There was no privacy in all that vast space—few walls to hide behind, and no soundproofing between neighbors. “You can hear everything in this building,” my mother would say. And then: “The neighbors are listening to all our conversations; they’re writing them down for the F.B.I.” When we’d first moved in, a year after my youngest sister was born, my mother had already been to the hospital three times. I thought the words “fallen ill” meant she had broken something, and in a way, she had.