Another excerpt...

...from Irene Vilar's "Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict" (p. 15):

My mother's absence [after her suicide when I was eight years old] made little difference to the house, except that she herself was no longer in it. I often roamed the quiet rooms with a blinding, almost obsessive desire for constant action: sleep-overs with my cousins, hunting for seashells, best grades in the classroom, collecting comic books, memorizing Christmas carols, flamenco dancing, masturbating, anything that kept me from feeling a thing.

(She's Puerto Rican, by the way.)