For three days in 2002, my mother secluded herself in our guest room in Santa Monica, furious and depressed over my second published short story. I had known she would see my work as a cruel funhouse mirror, so when my story ran in the Santa Monica Review, I stashed my four copies on a high shelf.

Conspicuously identical, they had caught her eye.

The mother in the story, Helen, starved herself of food and starved her teenage daughter, Leah, of affection. A child of Holocaust survivors, Helen was a “wire” mother who raised a nervous girl drawn to science and the safety of facts.

Whereas my mother embraced and kissed me. She taught me to read, curated novels for me as I grew and raised a writer who produced — as I pointed out when my first published story distressed her — fiction.

Still, there lay in my work an encoded truth about how she had mothered me when I was young. She called herself a “psychoanalyst by marriage,” given my father’s profession, so I knew she would perceive that truth in Helen’s relationship with Leah.

Until I was 12, my mother slipped repeatedly from her adoring and caretaking self into depressive states so deep they turned her stony, cold, verbally nonresponsive. This robotic mother made dinner and ironed my father’s shirts, but if she loved me, or even quite knew me, I couldn’t tell.

It terrified me.

In that state of fear, I, too, went numb. Burned into my memory is the image of a girl and her mother silently reflecting each other across a tiny, dark apartment — the parent in her distress looking vacantly away, the daughter in dread, watching carefully from the white of her eye.