Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on December 17, 2008
Literary Imagination 2009 11(1):111-123; doi:10.1093/litimag/imn071
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Nothing Holy
*No. 57, Magazine Street, #2, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Every son is damned to tell the story of his father, and in the telling the story becomes his own. Mine begins and ends with Mia Rainowski. She was the only woman my father ever loved, and I have spent most of my adulthood hating him for it; hating him because my mother deserved better than that. She knew that she was his second choice, that the only reason he married her was because Mia Rainowski had abandoned him after a five-year fevered relationship. My father never got over being betrayed by her; his journals from that time—the months leading up to her leaving him—are hurtful to read and often a little pitiful. He had been in the habit of keeping a journal every day before he knew her, a vague paragraph or two, but after they met and crashed into love at college his daily journal entries blossomed into