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It was not until many years later that something new occurred to me: how lonely she must have been. What also occurred to me around the same time was that perhaps she didn’t stand out after all; perhaps there were hundreds, even thousands of other women like her. They would have conducted their liv…

It never occurred to my mother that things could have been different for her. When she saw a problem, she thought only about how she could solve it herself, not whether she could appeal to others. The charisma she possessed, and the authority she commanded, made her independent from other people, s…

Everyone agreed that privacy was important. “Not just important—it’s your right. It’s a right,” Donika explained, her voice charged with all the wisdom and authority she had accumulated during the many years spent opening envelopes.

I thought about her words on the morning of the election. Why did my parents hesitate to vote? Why did they not simply go out to savour the freedom they’d been longing for? The staged yawning, the theatrical sleep, and the faux indecision all gave the impression that what they had wanted all these …

My grandmother was not nostalgic for her past. She had no desire to return to a world in which her aristocratic family spoke French and visited the opera while the servants who prepared her meals and cleaned her clothes could not read or write. She had never been a Communist, she said, but nor did …