Freakishly, by chance, I discover my mother’s given first name is different from the name she used. I’d never heard a whisper of this secret. As a writer, the discovery is material manna. As a daughter… well, strange news, indeed.

In the inexplicable alignment of fate, I’m a month away from publication of my third book, Call It Madness, a novel about young woman Avah who unexpectedly realizes her mother lied two decades ago when she claimed Avah’s great-grandfather died, his beloved house sold. Now, I unearth this secret my mother kept so well. I carry my mother’s name that was at once her name and not her name.

Where is the dusky line between fiction and life? Impossible, this seems, impossible, that I’ve written about my life in reverse. Kierkegaard wrote, “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely…”

How meagerly we know this world, the littleness of the stuff that structures our own stories. Stacking firewood on Sunday afternoon, I listen to a NYT story written by a sighted man about traveling with the unsighted. The upshot? How we understand the world in pieces. The whole is an impossibility for any one of us.

And yet, fiction aims to manifest a perfect miniature world, a shimmering sphere, a handful of secrets and mysteries revealed one-by-one, like a matryoshka doll. At its center, is there a grain of rice or a chip of coal? A folded fortune like a slip of paper in a sweet cookie, a koan to clench in a fist and ponder. A way to reflect the whole of life, this impossible life.