Lyn Hejinian is the author of "My Life", and her voice serves to narrate the poems in this collection. As a child, the narrator fears her uncle with the wart on his nose and is shy of her aunt's deafness. She dips into and recoils from the water, but a word is a bottomless pit which becomes pregnant and splits open to give birth to a stone egg. The narrator thinks of the densely shadowed overtones as she begins a paragraph about her childhood being spent in a manner of waiting. At night, the narrator sits on the windowsill, singing. The narrator is so stubborn as a toddler that when she is crossed, she holds her breath until she loses consciousness. In the afternoons, when the shades are pulled down for her nap, the dark yellow light coming through makes the narrator thirsty. When the narrator sees fishing boats, she thinks of the sky and the banks toward the West. Nothing interrupts birthday parties when the narrator is a child, as she wears Mary Janes and sips Shirley Temples. The narrator tries the word "moth" because she cannot get the word "butterfly." She secretly vomits in the school bathroom because she misses her mother. The narrator watches her parents every night because she fears they will pack and leave her.