Tami sits with me in my mind, out of hiding from her witness protection program new life that she lives on account of her former beauty queen daughter’s murdering ex-husband having recently been released after his 20 years or so sentence for killing the real estate developer who saved Tami’s daughter from the pole she was working to make the to-be-murderer husband mad. o the tales that can be told using only actual occurrences. Not like nothing interesting ever happens.

I am shown a glossy picture of bookstore shelves, rows and rows of tight paperbacks, each one tweezer-selected from myriad possibilities in their writers’ minds. and bound, more real than reality, more noun-like than the most hoped-for limits of believability, with stiff paper spines, and several kinds of plastic whether you like it or not.