I’m hardly a stranger to dire circumstances and consider myself lucky and charmed since there was always someone close to me confronted by more severe challenges, such as my recently departed father, who struggled with chronic drug-addiction for most of his life. My second boyfriend hung himself. I saw a man stabbed in Times Square when I was 9, have been shot at by a pistol-wielding meth addict and have seen someone plummet to his death from a bridge. I suppose that my neutral perspective on such things stems from my having grown up in the disinvested Bronx neighborhoods of the bleak 1970s and desperate 1980s. more