This first chapter opens with a mysterious isolated moment: “a single instant surrounded by dark” (3). Mary Karr remembers herself at 7 years old, being asked by Dr. Boudreaux, her family doctor, if she can show him any marks or bruises on her body. It is night time, and her family’s house is full of strangers. There is an ambulance outside, and Sheriff Watson is holding her 9-year-old sister, Lecia. Neither their mother nor their father is at home; their father is working the night shift at the local oil refinery, and their mother has been sent away “for being Nervous” (6). Karr understands that she and Lecia will have to go stay with some neighbors, several of who are standing outside their house in their nightclothes, staring at whatever has just happened. 

Karr does not yet fully explain this incident, which she explains took her years to remember in full. She compares the feeling of being haunted by something that she cannot quite remember to an erased piece of writing on a blackboard that retains the shape of what was erased. She then recalls her parents and their early courtship: “The missing story really starts before I was born, when my mother and father met and, for reasons I still don’t get, quickly married” (10).