RECORD

Born in 1972 into a big Boston Irish Catholic family world, where stories,
rituals, loyalties, weddings, wakes, grievances, laughter, and old wounds
all lived close together. The emotional weather of that world would stay
in the bloodstream long after childhood ended. It shaped tone, shaped memory,
shaped the eye for detail, and probably shaped the need to keep a record.

These were years of family density and social texture. People arrived with
history attached to them. Nothing was ever only present-tense. Every room
contained old stories, old hurts, old alliances, and unspoken hierarchies.
That sense of layered time became one of the permanent structures underneath
the later fiction and essays.

Music and language entered early, not necessarily as career paths but as
ways of perceiving. Tone mattered. Voice mattered. The emotional truth of
a sentence or a song often mattered more than overt explanation. There was
already an instinct toward observing how people carried themselves, what
they avoided saying, and what still came through despite their efforts.

By the time college approached, the outer shape of adulthood was still unclear,
but some inner materials were already set: affection for working people, distrust
of false polish, attraction to memory and place, and a sense that whatever kind
of life came next would somehow involve words.

LINES

NOTE

This period matters because almost everything later grows out of it:
the family material, the wakes and weddings material, the Cape material,
the attraction to both systems and stories, and the lifelong effort to
reconcile structure with feeling.