What I loathed - what I’d always loathed - were the conversations people had tried to engage me in countless times over the years: you tell me how your father whipped you with a belt; I’ll tell you how I was left to cry for hours alone in my room, how I wasn’t allowed to play piano, how lonely and sad I felt as a child, and after that we’ll be intimates, because each of us will know who broke the other. There was nothing phonier in the world. It was no one’s business who’d broken me; maybe I’d never been broken