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I reflected on the fact that Tiffany lamps would never again be appealing; they had ruined themselves for all time, these aberrant lamps, like Belle Epoque paintings and tapered Coca-Cola bottles and ballet dancers by Degas and handblown Murano glass figurines and those Toulouse-Lautrec absinthe bo…

My mother had not been invited to the memorial service, which concluded with a family dinner at Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. We sat in a private back room, in neckties and in silence, the latter awkward but expressly desired by my stepmother, and disturbed only by the bevy of liveried waiters who annou…

Why did my father always buy houses in such places, hoping for some connection to a society that would never otherwise have welcomed him? I was fond of recalling that château on Lake Geneva in which he died, a somewhat abashed variation on the Rothschilds’ Château de Pregny. I could picture the fad…

In Switzerland one has the right to die, she had always said, and that’s what the doctors kept telling me as well. Even the clinic’s ethics committee told me that, advising that I give consent for them to cease further treatment, to just turn the plastic valve of the morphine tube up a little, beca…

Sometimes, often, I’d told myself that it wouldn’t have been an indication of mental health to be able to adapt to such a deeply disturbed family. And how I had ever succeeded, how it’d even been possible to succeed in extricating myself from these unfathomable abysses and becoming a halfway normal…