If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done; swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he wound up with.

Just as my search for my mother had in some ways shaped my life, her faith that I was alive had shaped hers. She couldn't search, but she did the next best thing: She stayed still.

Reading was a huge part of my life as a child - we were a family of storytellers.

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

The gift my mother gave me was the gift of possibility. From an early age, she instilled in me a belief that I could do anything I wanted to do. It wasn't a matter of, 'Can I?' or 'Should I?' It was just, 'You can, you must, you will!' She wanted me to believe that anything was possible.