Excerpt from I Will Be Complete by Glen David Gold, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Later, I phoned my mother to tell her much of this conversation. I treated our talks back then like trips down hallways with certain rooms under lock and key, but I didn't think about why I was so careful. I told her about the novelist introducing me as his son, which she found delightful. I didn't say he'd asked if she was okay, or that I'd said she wasn't.

"What did he say about Peter?" she asked.

"He said Peter was involved in white slavery?" I rarely speak with that uptick. But I was asking a question as subtly as I knew how, not very subtly at all. What exactly were Peter's limits?

She answered in a way that I would have said I felt nothing about. "Oh, Peter. You know, it was so hard to stay mad at him. He was like a big kid."

And there it was, that statement I felt nothing about, remembered for decades when I have long forgotten the details of birthdays and first kisses. How did I really feel? I felt a dry, hot, constricting tension that I did not allow dominion over me. I felt like I wanted the conversation to be over so I could tell people about it and read from their faces how I should feel too. Might it be disturbing that my mother had suggested human trafficking was forgivable, if not childlike? I'm not asking that rhetorically; I'm looking for confirmation. I look to you, you nod, I nod back.

"How do you feel, Glen, about a man you knew well perhaps being the worst sort of human being?"

With pride in my voice at my own detachment, I would say, "Nothing," and upon your suggestion—probably unspoken, probably just a puzzled squint that I'm trained to look for—that someone more fully aware might feel something, I would think, "No, I'm too strong for that. Nothing can touch me."

That reaction is what this story is about. For much of my life there has been a circuitous pathway between when something happens and when I react. This gives the illusion of stillness, when in fact it's about trying to accommodate too much at once. I do not have feelings so much as I gauge what a loved one would want me to feel, and then I tell myself about that.

Perhaps that's familiar to you. Have you ever used a key on the lock of an old mountain cabin, felt it stick, and tried to imagine its teeth engaging tumblers? Have you tried making friends with its unknowable history, coaxing it into unfreezing, and have you promised you will not give in to a burst of anger that could snap it in half? Then you know what it is like to be my mother's son. It's exhausting and it's where art forms are born. I think Baroque draftsmen who made etchings of labyrinths were men raised by shattered women.

Peter Charming is a part of the story, but really, I'm looking for my mother, or what remains of her. There is not going to be redemption here; nor am I going to indict her as a monster. There is another way to go for those of us who can no longer love our mothers. I have learned compassion for her, what an old friend calls "compassion from a distance." My mother's life has been a tragedy but mine has not. And let's be honest here. My mother isn't the story, either.

I'd like to tell you about myself, which makes me want to apologize, the way my needing anything always does. I place a high value on autonomy. When I was so young that my memories were hardly even meant to be permanent, three or four years old, my parents and I were watching television. I saw actors talking to camera. It impressed my parents. They said there was something sophisticated in admitting that the scene had an audience. So, while I was hammering the flippers of my pinball machine, or sinking shampoo bottles in the bathtub as if they were my great-grandfather's U-boat, I began talking to camera myself. I knew it wasn't real, but it was also as vivid as the adventures I gave my stuffed kangaroo.

Excerpted from I Will Be Complete by Glen David Gold. Copyright © 2018 by Glen David Gold. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.