One evening many years ago at a graduate school party, an elderly and reclusive poet asked me in all seriousness (he had no other mode) if I had ever been in love. I was twenty-three at the time and how was I supposed to answer that? I had been in the kind of love that I had been in. I told him that, yes, I had been in love. He told me that I wouldn’t write anything worth reading until I had my heart broken in the kind of way that would cause a man to go live alone on a Greek island with a dog for a year and speak to no one but the dog. Has something like that ever happened to me? That kind of heartbreak? I chuckled because what are you going to do? At twenty-three I could not write a straight line or consider an honest thought. And so it seems futile to write this testament for you, my daughter. Like me, you will not understand the story until you are well seasoned in trauma and joy. You will not have the eyes for it.

The story is lodged in my mind like a heavy gem. Like a cartoon diamond from the opening credits of a Pink Panther movie. Each facet contains a mirror with another story that reels off another half-truth about what happened. And when I inspect one part, the gem twirls and brings up another reflection of another ghost. Restless spirits chase each other across the hard surface of this dazzling chunk of truth like the clumsy inspector running after his elusive prey. I turn my gaze to a curved slice of the diamond mirror as I fall asleep. I awaken with another real story, another facet turned to the light. I contain, as Whitman said, multitudes. But the multitudes are all me and all of them are half-true.

As I write this now, in a farm house in Connecticut, a large black dog is sleeping at my feet. He is twitching. His sleeping feet are chasing a mysterious shadow into a shadow hole. He grinds his teeth on his dream but never quite catches it. He shakes the darkness from his head with a jingling of tag and collar. He tells me it is time to begin.

A sample from Nowhere Slow: Eleven Years on a Micronesian Island, Jonathan Gourlay’s memoir of cultural confusion, hilarity and tragedy, and a decade of soul-searching.