I have tried to be a good son to my parents, as I was an awful child. The surviving photographs of my toddlerhood are all lies—-I am beaming in them, apparently happy; I am a baby politician, forever glad-handing, forever smiling, my face fixed in glee upon the camera. I’m working an unseen constituency. But most of the time I was cross and inconsolable, and I wailed in my crib all night. My poor father had to put me in the back seat of their VW Bug and chauffeur me around the streets of New Haven at night—-the rickety motion of the car, or maybe the Harry Chapin or James Taylor 8-tracks in the car, finally would put me to sleep. Another trick was for my mother or father to lie on their back in the bathtub, clasping me to their chest, with the recumbent collision of our bodies somehow muting my sheer burning anger at being alive, and I would finally black out.

Once we are well-established children, having reached seven or eight years old, the evidence of our origins is embarrassing stuff. Imagine a Victorian dowager meeting a naturalist, who presents her with an engraving of a Cro-Magnon using her teeth to rend the flesh from a mammoth bone, and who then says, “So, lady, this was once you.” Much like when we, at seven or eight, come upon the evidence of our barbarian years: the photographs of us sitting at the dinner table with our faces coated in swathes of peanut butter and chocolate pudding, with applesauce warpaint and ketchup henna; or of us standing, grinning like gargoyles, in the wreckage of a living room. There is something truly diabolic in a child who can walk but has no conscience.