SO GOES THE WAY is my answer, in memoir form, to the skeletons in the closet of my relationship with my adoptive mother, a woman who survived the Great Depression, could cook anything from scratch and sew from her own patterns, and whom I found maddening, puzzling, and hilarious. The historical section of So Goes the Way, a fictional work based on her life in 1920s North Dakota, was published in 2003 as my master’s thesis for the MFA under the title Magazine Henny Penny. The frame story—my present-day search for her past in the company of her talkative ghost—is a work I always return to in between other projects. It is the first and last story I ever tried to write.