"I loved her and she didn't even realize it. I'd look at her and think, 'Oh, she's really pretty. I wish . . .' And I'd wish, and I'd wish. But I never got that wish. My mother wasn't mean to me, but she wasn't warm, she wasn't close, the way she was with Alline. She just didn't want me. But she was my mother, and I loved her." (13)

"A certain urgency and vast new funds were assigned to the quest—ongoing in America for the previous two years—for a nuclear weapon. As Einstein put it to President Roosevelt: What if the Germans get one first?" (18)

"My life seemed divided between the upright Baptists and the proper little girlfriends on one side, and all this earthiness on the other. The clean and the dirty—I was caught in both worlds. Maybe you have to be a...