Porter is my eldest child, and I tended to be fiercely protective when he was criticized. He actually was not a big complainer about school. Simply selective in what he chose to do and say.
As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear.