All childhoods come to an end, and all families do too. My family was a divided one, divided by the strangeness of its characters and by endings that came too soon. I started out writing one story, but here I have written another. It is a confession about my family and about myself. It is about how I found solace in the book within this book, and how I came to terms with my memories of what was lost. On this journey, I found both instructions on to how to live and, by an arcane route, I recovered a simple secret of happiness