(Ed. note: In 2011, I was asked by a friend to participate in a storytelling show for a Jewish cultural organization. The theme was “escape.” Here’s a transcription of the notes I took while trying to come up with an “escape” story.)

When I heard last spring that Darin Strauss was coming out with a novel about Munchausen’s by Proxy, a syndrome whereby caregivers cause or feign illness in their charges in order to get attention for themselves, I didn’t know whether to be threatened or overjoyed.

So I guess we’re doing this today. 11 am, just took a small tiny bit to start. Why does everybody hate the taste? Tastes like getting fucked up to me. If David Chang used it in a dumpling people would wait outside in the rain for an hour just to look at one.

I had what I thought was a meeting, which turned out to be a “social lunch,” and I was freaking out the whole time because talking without an agenda with strangers is precarious.

When I was six or seven years old, waiting in bed to fall asleep at night, I used to imagine that bad guys wanted to kill my parents.

Dream me doesn’t know where she lives.

Alyssa Greenberger was a strange case. As first she was just risible, sending dippy notes to my boyfriend Misha in the History class they shared – she was hungry, said one of the notes Misha showed me. She wanted pizza.

On the day after Thanksgiving, 2012, I picked up the phone and learned that my mom had died.

Bereaved daughter of the spectacularly deranged.

I met Don at Payday, back when it was at the Ukranian Home on Second Avenue.