Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, recreating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful--even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling. Some things are absolutely unjust, without purpose, horrible and blinding, soul-destroying: the death of the beloved, the rape of a child. Situations some of us know all too well. There was no meaning in what my step-father did to me. But the stories I have made out if it do have meaning. More importantly, these stories do not function as some sort of retribution. They are redress for all those like me, whether they can write their own stories are not. My stories are not against anyone; they are for the life we need.