My reticent leanings began at a young age. I was about eight years old when my younger sister died from leukemia. Life for us before that was idyllic. Our father worked for a multinational oil company and we’d lived abroad starting soon after I was born, with all the benefits bestowed upon expatriates. My sister, Gail, was born in Jamacia, which for us in the 1950s was a paradise, very safe and very British. Gail’s cancer put an end to all of that. We returned to the United States.

Gail’s death was my fault, as far as I knew. I’d failed to do what a big brother was supposed to do: keep her safe. Sixty years later, I’ve not convinced myself that isn’t true. And I don’t expect I ever will. After her death, I began a retreat toward reticence. The kids my age in Yankeedom weren’t welcoming. I was foreign, spoke British, and wore short pants. It is understandable that my parents were concerned with their daughter leaving the world, and not with their son entering a new one. But I was lost. My only defense was to hide within my own thoughts.

A day after the funeral, my aunt came to our house and removed all evidence of Gail’s existence. No one explained why. Or I didn’t hear them. There’d been no warning. One day Gail was there, and the next she was gone. Her life had just stopped. A door had opened and closed. It was as if she’d always been dead, my good times with her but a figment of my imagination. Only the emotional evidence of her existence has lingered in me since that day.

My father wanted to jump back on the horse and go abroad after my sister died. But my mother refused. It was the foreign lands that she held responsible. The best my father got was moving to Texas several years later, which was not any better for me. I was a foreigner again, this time a Yankee. And there were no other expatriates there, as there had been in Jamacia and the other countries. I learned to be alone, to hesitate before making connections, suspicious and afraid of being hurt.

My father might have been sympathetic if he’d noticed. But he was traveling all the time, going to all those foreign lands where we could no longer live. And when he was home, he was everyone’s friend, a popular guy, always the life of the party. To me he was emotionally distant, unavailable, always, it seemed to me, to hold me accountable for what happened to my sister. I believe now that he had no such ill intention; it was only that the reminder of my sister that came to him when he saw me was painful. To my later siblings, a new set of them commenced upon my sister’s death, this was not the case. He was warm and engaged with them, it looked to me. And I was distant to them, as he was to me, because I was resentful they’d come between me and my parents, their very existence also a reminder that my sister was gone.

Talking to my father was painful. His responses were never inquiring, never more than an exposition of some experience of his own that my statements invoked in him. I understand now that my father’s disconnection with his son was his retreat by reticence, a moat encircling him to protect himself against the desolation that he would feel should I die young. Of course, he engaged in no introspection on such matters, at least not that he shared with me; I was foolish to think that he might take me in his arms and confide in me the horror he experienced over the loss of his daughter. His reticence was subconscious. It was unknowingly directed at me. To everyone else, he was the extrovert I would never be.

I’ve spent decades making excuses to myself about my desire for solitude: I was shy, a boy with no self-confidence, and then a curmudgeon. Despite these things, a very happy marriage occurred for me, with three beautiful daughters. But the solitudinarian is always nagging me beneath the surface, a damper on occasional sparks of extroversion. It is ironic that I turn to solitude to protect myself while my father employed the opposite strategy: a positive outgoingness that earned him hundreds of friends and helped him avoid recollections of Gail’s death and the subsequent demise of his dreams of a career in international affairs. Also, it haunts me that my reticence may have been utilized by me in a manner similar to my father’s scheme, that I may have been as distant to my daughters as my father was to me for fear of another failure by me to keep them safe.

If you are a serious reader, you know that a novel thrives on a turn to solitude. One needs only to pick up a Richard Russo novel to find how a childhood tragedy can have an impact on a character’s approach to life, the more humorous example being Straight Man. The novel Kissing the Wind by A.E.Hotchner, to be published next month, has a father I appreciated. He was always engaged with his son, who thought of him as his good friend, at least until the father’s fishing boat was crushed by a barge. My father died in his seventies, not by a sensational accident but by living as boldly as he did: the rich food, too many drinks, so many nights away from home in glamorous cities. Having so much ambition and lots of friends had its price.

Literature is full of protagonists who turn to solitude in their lives, mostly for reasons far more glamorous than mine, like the parents in Scott Turow’s Ordinary Heroes or Frederic Henry in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. In The Invisible Woman, by Erika Robuck, Virginia Hall, the brilliant spy, who was a heroine of the French Resistance during World War II, kept her own counsel to try to avoid personal attachments on account of the heartbreak that would accompany the capture and death of teammates at the hands of the Nazis. She was much better at espionage than she was at reticence, as it turned out.

In a book, life events are the grist used in the creation of the story, like the dough for bread. Happiness is an ingredient for an extrovert; tragedy is one for an introvert. In good novels, these elements are kneaded together, shaped and twisted in complex manners, and allowed to rise, in many cases over many years. When I read a good story, I watch the baking, and I obtain a perspective on the life of its protagonist. In my own life, achieving that perspective has been far more difficult.

– Mark Zvonkovic