In the preface to her book
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman writes, "I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet." She is drawn to “frictions and incongruities....Often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one."
I read these lines for the first time four years ago, as I was beginning to write my own book,
Yellow Bird, and it occurred to me that I, too, had been standing at a point of tangency...