From a memoir published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth is an editor at n+1.

Secrecy came easily, at first. It felt like the natural condition of adolescence, along with its counterpart, gossip. They fed off each other. We all had secrets: crushes, ambitions, jealousies, and sorrows, most of them still concealed from our everyday selves. I would no sooner have blabbed about my father’s illness than I would have let my mother find the stains on my sheets. Our housekeeper had been let go for reasons I couldn’t understand, and my mother began to do…