Those questions became all the more urgent when Nguyen had children. “One morning, not long after my second child was born, I got up from a night of broken sleep with a sentence in my mind. I wrote it down: When I became a mother, I became a refugee,” she writes. “It took a long time to make sense of it: how inhabiting motherhood has made me inhabit the refugee identity that I hadn’t thought belonged to me, or hadn’t wanted to belong to me. But I cannot be a mother without thinking about my mothers, cannot raise children without thinking about how I was raised.” In this outtake from Owner of a Lonely Heart, Nguyen recounts the songs she listened to as her family settled into the rhythms of another new life, in a new house, in Michigan — and felt a restlessness among her siblings and within herself that would drive them in such different ways.

-Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

All through the evenings of 1987 my sisters played “Stairway to Heaven” on repeat, turning it up louder so that I had no choice but to bear it. We had just moved to a far suburb, far enough for my stepmom to feel like she was back in the rural landscape of her childhood along the eastern side of Lake Michigan. Years later, I would learn that she and my dad had drained college savings for the down payment on the new house. But I didn’t suppose there was much in those accounts anyway.

I was twelve, going on thirteen. I spent my days reading library books and writing in my diary. I had no idea what “Stairway to Heaven” was about and maybe neither did my sisters. But we were all pretty sure it was deep, what with the mysterious lady, and the woods, and the paths, and the wondering. I disliked the song because I heard it too many times and the moodiness seemed to seep into the pages of my reading. It made me feel slower, stuck in a place I already hated.

My own taste in music tended toward the low-brow. I was drawn to power ballads, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Journey. I loved songs with narrative drama, especially if their music videos matched. Heartache was always a joy. Anh and Crissy were cool, so they listened to The Cure, Depeche Mode, Morrissey, Violent Femmes, way too much Zeppelin. If I said I didn’t like a song, I’d only hear it more. I gritted my teeth whenever I heard Pink Floyd singing, “We don’t need no education.” Obviously they do need it! I yelled once to Crissy. She thought I was a hopeless case. She said I was such a nerd, I’d probably never know true love.

Crissy was in love. With Eddie, a high school dropout-slash-musician who wore battered jean jackets and a petulant, pouty expression. His hair was teased and sprayed, layers sprouting out like a palm tree. He and Crissy made each other mix tapes and wrote love notes that I never did get a chance to read. Crissy wasn’t even allowed to talk on the phone with Eddie but of course she found her ways. Sometimes she borrowed the car, saying she was taking me and my sister to the mall. Instead we headed to a corner of Grand Rapids, where Eddie lived, full of broken sidewalks and Beware of Dog signs. She bought us McDonald’s, then told us that we had to stay in the car and out of sight, because otherwise we would be in danger. So Anh and I did, for how long, I can’t remember, slowly eating our French fries and McNuggets, all the while crouching beneath the line of the windows. We wouldn’t have dreamed of telling our parents. In such moments I felt like the very best sister.

I knew that the house was sold to us because the family who’d lived there had fallen behind on payments. The dad of that family was there when we toured the house. He stood in the dining room, where one of the walls was covered in a mural of woods and autumn leaves that looked just like a school photo backdrop, while we peeked into his kids’ bedrooms. For a long time after, I wondered where that family had ended up.

I hated the house. The carpet and wooden paneling and all the woods that surrounded us. The room I shared with Anh had one window that looked out at the backyard. In the distant tangle of tall grass and weeds someone had abandoned a concrete stoop, the metal railing still attached.

My parents loved that the house was hidden from the road. That they didn’t have to worry about neighbors at all. I didn’t bother saying that I liked our old suburban place, where friends lived up and down each block. I had no wish to be further concealed; I already felt hidden enough.

When my parents discovered this, I was up in the bedroom I shared with Anh, and was so immersed in the book I was reading that it took me a minute to understand what all the shouting meant. I heard my dad tell Crissy that she could never talk to Eddie again.

You can’t tell me what to do, she said. You’re not my real dad.

You listen to what I say, he thundered.

I hurried back to my books. When my dad got mad like that everyone knew it was best to hold your breath and stay out of his way. Get out of sight; get gone. The house grew quiet.

And then Crissy really was gone, staying with friends, staying with cousins and aunts. How long did this last — a few days, a few weeks? What I remember is my dad nailing a wooden plank over the door of her bedroom. If she wanted to return to get her things, that’s what she would find. We all tried not to acknowledge what had happened. Meaning, pretend that nothing had happened. As if Crissy were always at a friend’s house for dinner. Soon, Anh and I realized that it would be nice to have access to Crissy’s things. She’d left in a hurry. Most of her clothes, jewelry, makeup, and nail polish were still in her room. It didn’t take long for Anh and me to undo the plank over the door. Whatever we wanted — a gold lamé skirt, some bracelets — we threw into our room before nailing the door shut again.

Those wild teenager years, is what we say now. My mind jumps ahead to Crissy’s return, to the grudging way my parents began to accept Eddie, though they never liked him. No one really did, maybe not even Crissy. We all just waited it out, I guess. Crissy and Eddie were perpetually on again, off again. Once, they drove across the country, to Los Angeles, so he could try out for a rock band. I remember they fought in a way that I thought belonged only to grown-ups. I didn’t want to know or care. I wanted to be long gone myself, off to college without looking back.

But I still had the 80s to get through, years until high school graduation. I spent long months looking out the windows of a house I couldn’t stand, listening to songs that I hated or loved or grew to like, watching the world, or so it seemed, flash by in the nightly programming delivered through the television screen. My grandmother Noi, a Buddhist, did not talk about wanting things. But wanting occupied so much of my time. I wanted a house of my own, in the middle of a city. Sidewalks and light pollution. I wanted to know what it felt like when my sisters cried about some boy, playing “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” on repeat. I wondered if that was the future, inevitable, that love would require something to be broken. And always someone leaving.

Beth Nugyen’s book, Owner of a Lonely Heart, is out this week from Scribner.