“I have always known what it means to be a character in someone else’s story. My birth was marked by an asterisk in Maus.* As I emerged into the fluorescent lights of St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village (it seems strange, to use “I” for that self I cannot remember), some other part of me fell through my father’s black tear of ink on the page. Or rather, not one page, not one asterisk, but hundreds of thousands in books being opened for the first time, being printed for the first time, even now.”