It’s hard for me to talk about love,’ she said. ‘I think movies are the way I do that.

Maybe she had some sort of extraordinary quality, secret even to her. Maybe she did have the power to alter the things she’d always assumed she’d have to endure.

Everybody in my family believed in ghosts, and my grandma said it wasn’t just bad people who turned into them, it was bad deeds too.

When I moved, the broker had told me there was something good for the brain about living near the sea, something about ions. But I often felt like the water was insulting me, like, “I’m...