With or Without You: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

for turning an invisibly clogged pore into a gaping wound, and, like most women in the industrialized world, I sometimes hallucinate that my legs are as thick as sequoias.
    During my late childhood, I hid inside Double XL sweatshirts. I was in junior high when the nineties grunge-rock movement arrived. Though I was never cool enough to commit to the whole punk-rock aesthetic, I finally had both an explanation and an excuse for my billowing sweaters. I learned too late that it actually takes a lot of effort to look rebellious and morose, and my nihilism, however authentic, was just plain dumpy.
    My mother was a product of the seventies. If you didn’t have to lie down horizontally and hold your breath to zip your fly, she felt,your pants were obviously too big. All the flannel I was buying in my early teens had her deeply concerned. One Saturday after a very satisfying afternoon of moping in my bedroom, I walked into the kitchen to pour a bowl of cereal. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table. A cigarette dangled from her wrinkled lips. She looked me up and down, the ember of her Newport bobbing in sync with the scan of her eyes. She reached out and tugged on the enormous plaid shirt I was wearing.
    “Honey,” she asked in a plaintive voice, “why do you always look like a fat forty-year-old lesbian?”
    Around this time my mother got a job as a manicurist in a full-service beauty salon, and her co-workers persuaded me to bob my long, tangled hair. It was a ruse, I soon learned. Once they got me in their clutches these women held me down on a chair in the back room of the salon, swabbed my upper lip and eyebrows with hot wax, then ripped it off.
    “Jesus Christ!” I screamed.
    “You have to suffer for beauty,” they cackled. There was a gaggle of them, all small-town beauticians with electric tans and darkly penciled lips that made them look as if they were wearing masks. The smell of coffee and cigarettes wafted from their mouths as they hovered uncomfortably close and, one by one, plucked the more stubborn hairs from my face.
    I have come to understand this moment in my life as a humanitarian act. Twelve-year-old girls aren’t supposed to have mustaches, and mine had been there since I was eight. For the sake of dignity, it had to go. While I didn’t twirl around my bedroom singing “I Feel Pretty” after the women in my mother’s salon worked their sadistic magic, I could look at a mirror without imagining that a lesser primate was looking back in the reflection. And who knew what puberty would bring? Maybe one day I
would
become beautiful.
    Shortly after the makeover, while I was organizing one of the many heaps of clutter that Mum loved to amass in our tiny home, I stumbled upon a picture that crushed my hope of ever becoming an object of beauty. It was a black-and-white photo of twenty-year-oldKathi standing in the glassy stream of a waterfall, naked except for a microscopic bikini bottom. Her arms are folded over her small but perfect breasts, her head is tilted back, and there’s a smile on her face that suggests a night of marathon sex.
    “Mum, who took this picture?”
    “My God,” she gasped. “Your father.” She snatched the photo from me and considered it. “You’re in there, too, Nikki.”
    Hidden beneath the taut skin of her stomach, I am something bigger than bacteria but smaller than a tadpole, a whorling system of cells that my mother’s antibodies still recognize as an invasion. It was the first visual proof I’d ever found of one of my mother’s favorite bedtime stories: “How My Only Child Came into the World.” A trashy, extravagant creation myth, I heard it as often as other kids heard “The Three Little Pigs.”
    MY PARENTS SPENT JANUARY of 1979 in Hawaii. Like many New Englanders, they’d saved their money all year so that they could get away for the coldest, darkest month of the winter. My mother discovered that she was pregnant a few weeks into their trip. According to