The other day, I had the chance to introduce a friend of mine to Oddballs, William Sleator’s collection of stories about growing up in the early Sixties. (The book is described as "semi-autobiographical" various places, but I take Sleator at his word when he asserts, that "unlikely as it may seem—I have told only one lie about my family in this book." Call it a memoir; it’s at least twice as truthy as A Million Little Pieces.) The stories are about an ethnic childhood, and the ethnicity is "weird"; Sleator’s parents were too young old to be hippies and too professional (his father was a professor; his mother was a research physician) to be beatniks, but they were full-on weird. Sleator’s stories reflect the sensibilities of the man who would grow up to give me nightmares with House of Stairs and make me read and laugh and re-read with Interstellar Pig:

When my sister Vicky and I were teenagers we talked a lot about hating people. Hating came easily to us. We would be walking down the street, notice a perfect stranger, and be suddenly struck by how much we hated that person. And at the dinner table we would go on and on about all the popular kids we hated at high school. Our father, who has a very logical mind, sometimes cautioned us about this. “Don’t waste your hate,” he would say. “Save it up for important things, like your family, or the President.” We responded by quoting the famous line from Medea: “Loathing is endless. Hate is a bottomless cup; I pour and pour.”