"Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul. He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home."

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Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

— Joan Didion