My mother tells me that I'm picky. She tells me this every time I express some desire to have things done a certain way, which is not the same as the right way, the easiest way, or the shortest way, but the way that I consider best for my personal system and way of thinking. Any time I exhibit any trait of this so-called pickiness—when I would rather rewrite a sentence seven times than finish a full draft of the fifteen page paper first, or when I would rather spend a month slowly putting away my belongings in my new dorm room than shoving them out of sight to organize later—my mother plucks her favorite story to retell of how this has simply been my nature from birth.

"I was so afraid you wouldn't grow," my mother always starts out, already frustrated by the current trigger for recounting this tale and further aggravated by recalling the memories of almost two decades past. "You were so small when we brought you home, and then you just wouldn't eat!" She recounts the many traumas of my infancy, most of which have to do not with direct misbehavior but with food. The most infamous one is that of her trying to feed me rice, one grain at a time. Isn't one grain of rice as good as any other? Not for me. I had to specify which exact grain of rice was suitable each time. If my mother disregarded my request or accidentally picked the wrong grain, I would refuse her selection.

"You couldn't talk, but you would just mmm," says my mother, demonstrating for those not present during that meal my physical refusal by jerkily turning her head to the side and holding it stubbornly. I tried to get her to stop doing that when she was driving until I realized that her eyes weren't leaving the road anyway, just narrowing in an intense, menacing glare. She vividly remembers those trying times again and wants me to know how much she went through. She usually neglects to tell her audience that this happened exactly once and was not a mealtime ritual.

"Wait," I'll say, in defense of my former self, whom I don't at all remember. "I'm exhibiting only positive traits; I was decisive, independent, determined. I knew what I wanted, and I didn't want anything less. I wouldn't just accept anything that people would feed me, even if my survival depended on it. I had standards that had to be met." I twist the story to make it suit my purpose, rose-tinting the picture in my mind so that the rice almost glows pink. It is, in a way, satisfying to hear this story on an almost weekly basis and to take comfort in the uncanny similarity of my past and present character traits. The undisputedly continuous line of pickiness generates a certain sense of confidence in myself, that this is the way I am meant to be because it is the way I have been since I was young. The way I have turned out, almost two decades later, is neither a fluke nor a mistake.

Continuing and expanding on this theme of conviction early in life is the first and possibly definitive story that Brodkey delves into in Writing on the Bias, in which she, as a child, walks door to door conducting a census. Since she no longer has any recollection of it and "stories are all that remain of that childhood experience" (528), this tale may be better archived under "family folklore" (527); however, the accuracy of the story as a true depiction of past events is secondary compared to the impact that it has had and still has on her view of herself as a writer. Brodkey takes comfort in the fact that she has been a writer since before she could remember and in retrospect holds it as proof that she always had more to say on paper than dry, formulaic, academic writing would give her license to during her school years. It seems that she inscribed her future as a writer into her Big Chief tablet, and those early adventures in the neighborhood provided her with her foundation for developing her skills as a professional.

These two family myths began circulation with our mothers. They would have stayed with our mothers if not for being constantly repeated and, more importantly, being accepted and embraced by Brodkey and me. Perhaps we take these stories as conveying something more than what they were meant to, as "explaining human behavior as inborn" (528) when in reality they are simply our mothers' personal memories. Brodkey says that "the past provide[s] the only possible understanding of the present" (528), but when we manipulate the past to suit the present, the present also provides an understanding of the past. These myths are pieces in the jigsaw puzzles of ourselves, and because they seem to fit in color and shape, we don't raise any of our hidden doubts that they may not have been among the original pieces. They will keep the places they currently occupy because nothing has yet come along to dispute their presence there. Blood-related until proven adopted.

Life was much simpler when actions were simply governed by instinct, because young children don't even make or have to make conscious decisions. They just are, and they do, and that's it. The vestiges of childhood certainty breed self-confidence later in life. Brodkey would probably retell her family story when asked how she became interested in writing and when she started. I would probably do the same with mine when asked why I would rather skip a meal than suffer through a bad dinner in a dining hall. I am comfortable saying, "I don't do things that way" because I know, or I have been told, that I never have.

People don't have to know me very long to find out how structured I like my schedule and my world. My mother tells me that I'm picky. I tell her it's genetic. My friends say I'm anal. I say I'm just particular, but whatever we call it, we all agree that it's just the way I am.