I still think about Peter, the man I loved most in the world, all the time.

At two in the afternoon, when he would come and pick me up and take me for rides; at five, when I would read to him, head on his chest; in the despair at seven p.m., when he would hold me and rub my belly for an hour; in the despair again at nine p.m. when we would go for a night ride, down to the Royal Cliffs Diner in Englewood Cliffs where I would buy a cup of coffee with precisely seven sugars and a lot of cream. We were friends, soul mates and lovers.

I was seven. He was fifty-one.

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On the day I met Peter I saw two boys and their father wrestling at the other end of the pool, splashing and laughing. One of the boys was very handsome. He was the smaller of the two, maybe about 9 or 10, skinny, with longish brown bangs. He wasn’t just handsome; he exuded happiness. There was brightness in his face and skin, supple quickness to his legs and arms and hands, and a gentle quality to his eyes and face that was rare for a boy. His older brother looked happy too, but not with that same vividness.

Their father had bowl-cut sandy-silver hair with Sixties bangs like a Beatle. He had full lips, a long, pointy nose that might have looked unattractive on someone else, but not on him, and a strong, pert chin. When he looked in my direction, I saw that his eyes were vigorously aquamarine. He smiled at me, his face full of lines – on his forehead, by his eyes, and around his jaw. I knew he must be old, to have lines and greying hair and loose skin on his neck, but he had so much energy and brightness that he didn’t seem old. He didn’t even seem adult in the sense of that natural separateness adults have from children. Children understand the distance between themselves and adults the way dogs know themselves to be separate from people, and though adults may play children’s games, there is always that sense of not being alike. I think he could have been lined up with 100 men of similar build and disposition and I could have pulled him out from that line, and asked, “Can I play with you?”

I crossed the length of the pool and asked just that. He answered, “Of course,” and then immediately splashed my face, frolicking with me as though I were his own child. I splashed the boys’ faces and they mine, for these boys didn’t seem to mind playing with someone so much younger and a girl to boot. At one point the handsome boy gently dunked my head, and when I rose, I laughed so hard that for a moment it seemed all I could hear was my own laughter. Then the father lightly took me under the arms and whizzed me around, laughing like a big kid. When he stopped, the world was off balance and a strange burst of white flooded his features, like a corona.

Later, when the lifeguards called everyone out of the pool for closing, the father, whose name was Peter, introduced us to a sweet-looking Hispanic woman named Inès, who had been wading by herself in the shallowest part of the pool while we played. Peter teased her about her need to be close to the pool’s edges and joked to my mother and me that Inès was nervous about things no one thought to worry about, such as going on carousels or riding a bicycle. Inès had an awkwardly pretty face, drowsy, sun-lined eyes, long curly hair that started out dark but midway changed to a dyed apricot shade, and the mild, disorientated look of a wild fawn. She had purple press-on nails; two had gone missing, and the rest had tiny black peace signs painted on them.

Peter told us everyone’s names: the older boy, Miguel, looked about 12 or 13 and the younger boy, Ricky, only a couple of years older than I was. By the end of the day I’d forgotten all the names but I remembered the first letters of the parents’ names: P and I. I kept thinking of them, P and I, and their promise to invite my mother and me to their house. A few days passed and nothing happened, so I forgot them.

I might have permanently forgotten, except for some vague stamp of joy that the incident left on me. We were in Poppa’s 1979 Chevy when Mommy said they had called her up, or, rather, Peter had called.

“We’re invited to go to their house. Isn’t that nice?” When Poppa said nothing, she continued. “Peter and Inès. And the boys, Ricky and Miguel. Miguel and Ricky. Such nice boys. Well-behaved boys, not rough at all. Such a nice family.”

“Their house? It is around here?”

“Not far. On the phone, Peter said Weehawken, right where it meets Union City. I just wanted to run it by you. See what you think?”

“About what?” “Going there. On Friday while you’re at work.” “I don’t care.” “Well, I thought I’d run it by you.” “I don’t care. These people are not axe murderers, right?” “They’re a very nice family. Very nice people. A lovely family.”

“Everything is so nice to you. Everyone is so nice. Everything is so lovely.”

“So it’s set, then,” said Mommy. “For Friday at noon.”

You begin Tiger, Tiger saying you began to write it the summer after Peter died. What did the writing of it offer you?

I’ve written all my life and before I could literally form words, I drew pictures that told stories. This is my identity. Most writers find that their first work is very personal. They may choose to tell the story as memoir or fictionalize it, but most writers seem to have the drive to write some form of autobiography. Even people who don’t write have an overwhelming human need to tell their stories. Some tell it through dance or they paint, or they are musicians. One’s experiences and their art are undeniably fused. Who knows what would have happened if I had no outlet? I don’t think I would be who I am today. Maybe I wouldn’t even be alive if I hadn’t expressed it; experiences like mine are toxic if you hold them inside.

Anyway, I hope readers will feel the difference between the prologue and the afterword. The prologue is my mental state right after Peter’s death. When I’m twenty-two, I’m still grieving and I’m being honest to my reader about missing him back then. It isn’t my voice now; it is so far from what feel in this current moment. Sometimes I have a dream that I am with him again and all I feel is great horror. The afterword is my voice now.

It's self-evidently a personal book and powerful and moving in its openness. Was there a tension between what the book told you about your childhood and what you wanted it to convey to others? What do you hope readers will think and feel as they read? What do you hope they will take away with them?

Reading has to be a fearless act; it’s like deep-sea diving. My ideal reader understands that these kinds of stories have been told since the beginning of time. Even through fairy tales. The kind of readers I hope for don’t judge me and they are not afraid to see with me. Privacy that maintains integrity is the only kind of privacy that’s worth maintaining. Secrets like the ones Peter had me keep don’t belong to me. I refuse to keep secrets that aren’t my burden. Maybe I’m overly optimistic but my greatest wish would be that somebody who is about to do what Peter did reads the book, and decides not to do it.

As for sensitive readers, they may need to skip sections. I always tell my friends that the ‘Nina’ chapter is the roughest because it’s the hardest for me as a reader. But I do think it’s important for parents to read the hardest scenes and if they are disturbed, to work through it either in therapy or in another way. My reasoning is because every child is vulnerable to abuse—it can happen to anyone—and if you can’t read the depiction in a book, then you cannot listen to your child’s account if it happens. And children sense what they can and can’t tell parents. They know your vulnerabilities, believe me. My mother never dealt with her own abuse and that’s partly why this catastrophe happened.

There are so many people I’ve talked to who are still protecting their parents from knowledge of sexual abuse and by doing so, carrying the burden alone. Send the message to kids that you’re tough, you can handle anything as a parent and no matter what it is—I love you, we can deal with it.

While yourself and Peter are strong characters in the book, your parents are both strongly drawn, and your home life is always present. Was this surprising to you?

I strove to balance the narrative between my home life and Peter’s world and to present each character with fairness and empathy. I present my own self as flawed because I don’t believe a memoir writer should try to be the hero or heroine. Of course the writer is the protagonist, but if you are going to portray others as three-dimensional people, it’s important that you do the same with yourself. A lot of the book takes place during my adolescence so I’m as confused and self-centered as any other teenager.

I particularly sought to give Poppa his due; to me nearly every word out of his mouth is poetry. He could be absolutely cruel or completely wonderful, but he always had a creative, compelling way of speaking. My mother had her own unique way of interacting and being too, and it’s more subtle, but I hope I capture it.

Finally, Tiger, Tiger is a work of literature; what makes it literature for you, and how straightforward was that to achieve? Which authors and books acted as inspirations?

I’m a big fan of George Eliot; especially The Mill on the Floss. She captures childhood and its beauty but also the terror of going through everything for the first time.

I love Anna Karenina. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a masterwork. I think Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is genius. I really adore Dorothy Allison. James Baldwin gets to the heart like nobody does and the first time I read Faulkner I swear the world went Technicolor. I was influenced by my mentor John Vernon’s memoir A Book of Reasons because he writes quite a bit about sense perceptions. He makes a stroll through Walmart seem equivalent to landing on Mars.

I think books should let readers take from them what they need to. Kafka said, “A book must be an axe for the frozen sea with us.” Readers are resourceful and they find what they need to take away from a book without that author becoming didactic. Most of the works of art I admire take great risks; the authors have put away their fear of being judged. They have nerve. The world can’t change if it remains frozen. We can’t just have the same ideas circulating over and over. I think works of art inherently contain social value. You can’t separate art from our existence as social beings.