Defining Self

"My father was brilliant, embarrassed, funny, handsome. My mother was plain, serious, principled, kind. My grandmother was intelligent, lonesome for her other life, her dead children, silent. My aunt was beautiful, bitter, angry, loving. I fell among these adjectives in earliest childhood and was nearly buried with opportunity. Some of them stuck to me; others, finding me American and smooth, slipped away." -Grace Paley, "Family."