From excerpts of a lecture collected in The Poetics of Wrongness, which was published last month by Wave Books.

In late January 2013, I told my mother I was going to publish my memoir, called MOTHERs, despite the fact that she’d told me she did not want me to and that, if I did, terrible things would happen to her, to me, and to my children. A few hours after receiving my email and forwarding it to several friends with a note saying that I was breaking her heart, my mother, who was in Taiwan at the time, was…