My left leg is stuck out as if I was on the verge of going somewhere. My mother will meet him for the first time three months from now.
Hell hath no fury like an 8 year old about to not get Western Barbie. Christmas was not our strong suit. Easter—that my parents could pull off. It all happens i...
Like everyone in our family, I cut Uncle Ben a lot of slack. He’d returned from the Second World War a paraplegic. He would spend the rest of his life on the si...
The practice of medicine is based on the physician’s ability to gather story from the patient. Our story is our human identity and our humanity. It is also the ...
In his place is a little girl with ragged clothes and a dirty face. She has my blue eyes and a cowlick that sits above the peak of her forehead. It has been a l...
How does one find self-worth standing before the evidence of broken dreams, unrealized potential, and past mistakes? This is what plagued me as I stared at the ...
When he arrives, I am holding the paper bag (because the woman is always holding the bag) they gave each of us in the recovery room where one brash young woman ...
Sometimes you lie so much you begin to believe what you say. Sometimes you don’t even have to say the lies out loud to believe them.
I think these people mean to say, that my mother with Alzheimer’s, behaves differently from the mother I knew without Alzheimer’s.
“there’s no such thing as the Easter Bunny and there’s no Santa Claus—remember, we’re Jewish!”
Now, this gun, slung tight around my neck, is heavier than I thought it would be. And it’s loud. Louder than thoughts of home....
"She confided that she’d actually been divorced twice. “Now I’ve switched to women,” she added, as if it were another accomplishment. I was suddenly aware of th...
I’d be lying if I said my interest in forensic psychology wasn’t partially fueled by a need to prove I no longer feared men like him, at least in the beginning,...
I must face my own hurt and my own past, and I must continue on, not a fictional being at all, but one of blood and sweat, and that makes me capable of anything...
At 6, I suddenly knew I was adopted by the telling of a fairy tale. Not only did I belong to my parents, but also someone else! The myth of the adoption agenc...
They did not think: moonlit bank where my ancestors were unloaded from ships or branch from which bodies once swung. They did not have to...
When the clinic called for physicians, I volunteered. Of course, I wasn’t gay—all I needed was proof. I needed to find the clinic and its patients repulsive.
My mother took the greatest care of her porcelain Virgin Mary. She was two feet tall, dressed in white from head to toe, and as my mother claimed, cried when no...
Represented as a heartbeat of highs and lows, “The Story of Me” is a memoir of the artist’s life from birth through middle-age (pen and ink on 18”x24”drawing pa...
Lies don’t shine, no matter how hard one scrubs.
