Nafina tells Peter the 'black dog of fate' story during one of their regular Friday baking sessions in her apartment.

Peter secretly watches his grandmother pray in Armenian, smoke a pipe, and anxiously monitor televised Cold War news broadcasts.

Nafina dies unexpectedly, leaving Peter unable to ask her the many questions her mysterious stories and passing references had stirred in him.

The Balakian family moves from Teaneck into a custom-built house on Crabtree Lane in the elite New Jersey suburb of Tenafly.

Gerard announces that Peter will attend the private Englewood School for Boys rather than the local public high school.

Peter secretly drives to a midnight pool party and crashes the car, breaking several bones in his face.

Football games and Gerard's invention of the Sportade electrolyte drink become the shared language that gradually repairs the fractured father-son bond.

Gerard sends Peter a college-era letter containing an article about Armenian history, unexpectedly breaking the years of family silence on the subject.

Allen Ginsberg reads 'Kaddish' at Bucknell University and the poem's grief over a lost mother moves Peter to tears.

Peter refuses to attend the anniversary memorial service for Nafina and spends the weekend in Boston with his girlfriend instead.

Peter writes the poem 'Words for My Grandmother,' which surfaces haunting images of the Armenian past he never fully understood.

Peter reads Ambassador Morgenthau's memoir about the Armenian Genocide while rushing around New York City for a summer job.

Aunt Gladys reveals in Paris the suppressed history of Nafina's genocide trauma, killed family members, and her first husband's death.

Aunt Gladys relays her mother's cousin Dovey's graphic firsthand account of deportation, torture, rape, and survival during the Armenian Genocide.

Peter visits an Armenian memorial church in the Syrian desert, finds human bone fragments scattered on the ground, and carries some home.

Peter Balakian's memoir opens with his tender childhood relationship with his Armenian grandmother Nafina, who bakes with him on weekends and tells him cryptic folk stories whose meaning eludes him for decades. After Nafina's sudden death and a turbulent adolescence defined by suburban conformity and a strained relationship with his demanding father, Peter discovers poetry as his defining vocation in young adulthood. A series of literary encounters nudge him toward the Armenian past he has always circled without entering, and the anniversary of his grandmother's death finally compels him to write his first poem about her. Intensive research into Ambassador Morgenthau's memoir about the Ottoman massacres cracks open the history that his family kept silenced, and a Paris vacation with his aunts floods him with devastating firsthand accounts of what his grandmother survived. He becomes a public voice for Armenian recognition, publishing poems and confronting genocide deniers, while the memoir ends in the Syrian desert where Peter collects fragments of ancestral bone from the earth near an Armenian memorial church.

The core journey from grandmother's stories to genocide discovery and ancestral reckoning.

Nafina brandishes her cane to defend a stranger being beaten by attackers on a public bus in Harlem.

Peter, while on a teenage date, is suddenly overwhelmed by a disturbing memory of his feverish grandmother describing violence and an armed Turk.

Auntie Anna declares at the family's regular feast gathering that American suburbia 'would be the ruin of America.'

Peter silently wishes his family were Jewish like their suburban neighbors so he could feel fully included in the community around him.

Arax refuses to pay for a poor meal at a prominent French restaurant, causing the family's expulsion and an illicit arrangement with local police.

Peter and the women of his family take regular slow drives through suburban neighborhoods, loudly critiquing other people's houses through open car windows.

Gerard rushes to perform mouth-to-mouth and CPR on a man who collapses near them at a Columbia University football game.

Peter undertakes a school research project on the Near East and discovers that volumes about Ottoman history barely mention Armenia.

Arax walks into Peter's apartment the morning after Ginsberg's visit and finds the poet and a male companion together in his bed.

Peter meets the famous Armenian-American writer William Saroyan at Aunt Nona's Manhattan apartment, unsure whether the man is a kook or a prophet.

After Saroyan's death, Aunt Nona dreams of him transforming into a great owl and compares all displaced Armenians to owls flying in the dark.

Aunt Gladys tells Peter the story of his grandfather's five hundred pairs of shoes, stolen from him in Constantinople without recourse or explanation.

Peter discovers Nafina's legal document filed against the Turkish government and reads her written account of the family's weeks-long deportation march.

Peter reads Bishop Grigoris Balakian's eyewitness testimony from the German trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, who assassinated the genocide's chief architect, and weeps.

Peter visits the Aleppo city archive and discovers photographs of his aunts Gladys and Alice as young schoolchildren among Armenian refugees.

The secondary events of Peter's memoir reveal the texture of his family's unusual suburban life and the incremental moments that slowly made the Armenian past legible to him. His grandmother is a fearless figure who defends strangers on Harlem buses, and his mother erupts over mediocre food at French restaurants — behaviors that Peter eventually understands as connected to deeper histories of loss and dispossession. His father performs a life-saving act of medicine at a football game and then immediately refocuses on the game, reflecting the emotional compartmentalization that marks the older generation. As a young adult, Peter encounters Allen Ginsberg and William Saroyan, expanding his literary and Armenian cultural worlds in overlapping ways. The family's hidden grief surfaces further when Aunt Gladys reveals the story of his grandfather's stolen shoes and Peter discovers his grandmother's official legal complaint against the Turkish government. By the time he travels to Aleppo, Syria, and sees archival photographs of his aunts as young refugees, the abstract history has become devastatingly personal.

Family life, suburban identity, and the secondary revelations that shaped Peter's path.

Arax tells Peter not to 'get too attached to places in life' when announcing the family's move, without explaining why.

Peter and his father enter an era of strained relations when both want sole access to the household telephone.

Gerard explodes at the family dinner table, demanding to know whether Peter knows what the Turks did to the Armenians.

Arax pleads with Gerard to allow Peter to remain at Tenafly's public high school, but Gerard refuses to be moved by the appeal.

Peter impresses his high school English class with a poetry analysis and then gets a jockstrap flung at him in the locker room.

Peter discovers his Auntie Anna's book reviews and literary criticism, seeing her as a kindred intellectual rather than an uptight cultural snob.

During a cross-country road trip, Gerard spontaneously approaches a Sioux chief to discuss lost homelands and then says nothing about the encounter to Peter.

Arax tells Peter that Allen Ginsberg's poem 'Kaddish' is also about Armenia in some ways, and asks him to bring home several copies.

Auntie Anna lectures at Bucknell University on surrealism, and she and Peter discover they hold irreconcilable views about what poetry should do.

Aunt Gladys reveals that Nafina suffered a near-catatonic breakdown after the Pearl Harbor bombing, convinced the Turks were coming to kill her family.

Peter discovers, while reading Nafina's legal documents, that his mother and her sisters are actually half-sisters, a secret kept throughout his childhood.

Peter's aunt shows him the only surviving photograph of Nafina's family, telling him that every person pictured died in the genocide.

Aunt Anna angrily confronts Peter when he begins publishing poems about Armenia, insisting that genocide is not appropriate subject matter for poetry.

Peter reads his poetry at an Armenian Genocide commemoration in Times Square and sees Turkish protestors outside handing out pamphlets claiming the genocide never happened.

Peter makes an unplanned speech at the commemoration, imploring American citizens to reject Turkish efforts to erase the history of the Armenian Genocide.

The turning points in Peter's memoir are marked by sudden confrontations, quiet revelations, and decisions that force identity into the open before Peter has the context to understand what he is seeing. His mother's cryptic advice not to get attached to places, his father's eruption about the Turks at the dinner table, and the family's insistence on private school all carry unspoken histories that Peter only decodes later in life. His growing passion for poetry cracks open his understanding of his literary aunts and eventually becomes the instrument through which he explores Armenian identity for the first time. A series of revelations — that his aunts are half-sisters, that his grandmother suffered a trauma breakdown treated with electroshock, that the only surviving family photograph shows people who all died in the genocide — hit Peter in rapid succession as an adult. He goes on to publish poetry about Armenia, triggering an angry confrontation with Aunt Anna who had spent a lifetime keeping that history private. The section culminates with Peter stepping beyond the page and into direct public advocacy at a genocide commemoration where he encounters deniers face to face.

The key decisions, confrontations, and emotional breakthroughs that transformed Peter's worldview.