But senior year, Katie’s talent moved from talent to sorcery. She drew what was real and unimaginable. Where did she get these ideas? How did she dare to put th...
A memoir in the finest sense of the genre! An easy read, packed with astonishing events that flow into one another like water, The View From Breast Pocket Mount...
My father called me names, made me cry, and one time even threw my plate of Easter frittata at the wall because he said I was being fresh. But he was the best n...
As a little girl reading fairy tales, I came across the word “replied.” Though a bookish child, I somehow read “replied” as “rippled,” as in “Because I said so,...
My voice climbed an invisible staircase until at the top step of my skull it jumped up and down and waved its arms in the air. “Wake up, mom! Wake up!” I said. ...
As I watched this soft-spoken, self-effacing elderly man repeatedly humiliated by his wife, all the venomous rancor I had held for years completely dissipated. ...
I am lazy, fat, asinine, stupid. I still feel his red hot anger, the spit on my face, and the insults flying toward me. The feelings and labels remain, despite ...
Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, an elemental life not “frittered away by detail.” He wrote about the essentials of life, “I do believe in simpli...
An Excerpt from The Memoir Prize 2021 Honorable Mention: Our Family Walks by Nick R. Robinson; unpublished manuscript.
Leaning Left, 2:1, millennials want America to be an “us” society. They call it socialism, but this is incorrect. They do not want state ownership and control o...
A friend, or a date, or a stranger who spotted him lying in the street, a person brave enough to touch a seizing, unconscious man, would search Eric’s pants for...
I grew up in the Jewish version of The Wonder Years, an alternative universe where just about every person I interacted with was a Jew.
At ten, it sounded way worse than what I’d imagined. Tugging the chenille bedspread close beneath my chin, I wondered how her new friend talked Tiny into it. Th...
There were my mother’s stories, and there were my books. Books were imaginary but some books could be true; Betty’s stories were neither true nor not-true, they...
Her admission that her diagnosis was terrible news showed a vulnerability in her I had never before witnessed. I had believed that nothing ever weighed on her,...
