What might it feel like to be six months old? To have only recently discovered that your hands are your own and that not all round things are breasts? Or to celebrate your first birthday when you don't understand "first" and "birth" yet, and aren't sure about "day"? Or to wonder what the moon is and whether it's farther away than airplanes or the flies on the ceiling? Or to first figure out that books tell a story? Or that places stay and time passes? What might be the shape of your first inkling that you have a past? That words represent things? That you can imagine something that isn't true? That you are getting bigger? That your parents are fallible? That your will and theirs are not the same? That things die, and so will you? That you are a person with a history. This book is a biography of Brian Hall's daughter, Madeleine. Like traditional biographies, it begins with its subject's birth. Unlike them, it ends on her third birthday. Along the way, it describes the transition from in Read Less