A woman is startled awake by a loud sound. The first thing to flash through her mind as she jolts upright in in bed is My daughter . She pulls on a robe and rushes down the hall to the room where her daughter rests. She finds her there, sleeping peacefully, but all is not as she left it. The window is open, blowing in frigid fall air. Light from the streetlamp below streams into the room. The drapes flap in the cool dawn breeze. The sheets on the bed have been yanked down, leaving her daughter's prone body exposed to the morning cold. Strange , the mother thinks, but nothing more. She closes the window and rewraps the covers tightly around her sleeping child. She kisses her forehead, tells her she loves her, and tiptoes out of the room. My mother rarely told me stories about her life. I think she considered talking about herself an indulgence, a selfish hogging of the air. The things she did tell me were closer to off-hand comments than fully fleshed recollections, opaque statements made in passing never to be elaborated upon again. A college boyfriend who died in a car crash. Her days spent inserting catheters in the ICU. The time she flipped off a stranger for swerving into a parking spot that was clearly hers. How he followed her through the shadowy parking garage, thrust his own middle finger into her face, and growled, "I'll poke your god damn eye out." As a child, I clung to whatever stories she offered, hazy snapshots plucked from her memory that have only become hazier when filtered through the cluttered corridors of my own. Over a decade since her death, I still find myself sifting through the scattered shards of narrative she left behind, hoping that eventually I will assemble enough broken pieces to build something whole. One of these stories, however, has remained as clear to me as it was the first time I heard it, and that is the story of my mother and The Exorcist . Before watching The Exorcist was even a vaguely plausible option for my childhood self, my mother banned me from ever seeing it. It was just one of the rules of life. Don't talk to strangers. Don't cross the street without first looking both ways. Don't eat the raw cookie dough off the spatula. And don't watch The Exorcist . The movie had scarred her when she snuck off to see it at age fourteen against her own mother's wishes, and she felt certain it would scar me too. Not just scare. Scar. The distinction is important. Scare implies momentary fright. Scar leaves a mark. Though I had no conception that a movie could bring anything but magic and joy, had only ever found delight on the other side of TriStar's winged horse and 20th Century Studio's spotlight and drums, I heeded my mother's warning. It was something about the way she said those words. "Don't ever watch The Exorcist ." There was a desperation beneath them. A plea.   Excerpted from Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of the Exorcist by Marlena Williams All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.