Nissen: Look, I’m not going to call my mother a liar. (Can I call her a blatant un-truther? Maybe...) Let’s just say that I find it very very difficult to imagine that I had such a fabulous, story-ready response at the time. My memory of that night when I ostensibly spoke my great one-liner is very vague––and probably really only a construction compiled from the retellings of the story––but I feel like I either recall, or have extrapolated from the context, that I was confused by what my mother was trying to tell me, talking in circles about Daddy and Sneezy, hedging her point, waiting for me to catch on. It was bedtime; certainly I was tired. I was a child! I’ll concede this much: it’s possible my eyes were wide. It’s possible I seemed confused. It’s possible I really didn’t catch what she was trying to get at. I’d even say it’s possible that I was trying to read between the lines and what I thought, or feared, she was trying to tell me was that Mommy and Daddy were getting divorced, and she was couching the whole thing in some mishigas about cat allergies, hoping I’d think Daddy was leaving because of Sneezy, not because of Mommy.

As it turned out, no one was leaving. Not Daddy, and not Sneezy either. Daddy seemed inclined to stick it out, (though he never did have much of a relationship with Snee, who remained a sneezer all her life, and for much of it was a big barfer too. Those full-breeds––not the strongest constitutions...) and Dad’s allergy (of which I, for the record, have no tangible recollection) just seemed to dissipate after a while. Sneezy lived and sneezed and vomited expensive cat food for many many years. And was then replaced by Clementine, until she passed on, and then by Albert, who was the feline love of my mother’s life but who lived only six months longer than my father in the end. They both died last year, and my mom’s alone now. They may have gotten Sneezy for me all those years ago, but she was always my mother’s cat. She never has had a dog. Nor will she, I don’t think, have another husband. But she’ll have another cat. Of this I am sure. And she’ll continue to tell the story of that night in my childhood when I was ready to trade my father for a defective Korat who probably had more allergies than my father did! I never saw him sneeze...

Pope: The entire myth was a blatant lie, but it was easy to fool everyone. People assumed I was a descendant of the Popes of Hartford because of my aunts' mansion. My grandfather, a stonemason who worked tirelessly his whole life, saving his dollars with a Depression-era thriftiness, in his later years purchased an enormous Tudor mansion on Prospect Hill, the premier neighborhood in Hartford, where the descendants of the old-rich did, in fact, reside in a row of outsized, Gilded Age architectural wonders overlooking the city of Hartford, culminating in the Governor’s Mansion, the last house on the street. Next door to my grandfather’s house was an 18th century brick mansion, which had once been an inn where George Washington stayed the night. After my grandfather died, my four spinster aunts remained in the mansion, with the name POPE proudly displayed on the mailbox beyond the outlying gates for all to see.

Sherman: That therapy is a lifestyle choice.

Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel WE’RE SO FAMOUS, editor of DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON THE FILMS OF JOHN HUGHES, and co-founder of POST ROAD, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston.