Maybe I should tell her that Daddy drives with his knees while poking triangle holes in beer cans? Or that he once fell out his car door while rounding a corner...
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. ...
On the way home, he took me here, to this place under the Tappan Zee Bridge, on the shore of the Hudson, on the front lawn of an apartment complex where neither...
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...
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...
Since childhood sexual abuse is a risk factor for schizophrenia, I’ll always wonder what role Doug played in her plunge into insanity. I didn’t realize that the...
Gradually Mother’s cooking faded, along with her tan. No longer in the kitchen when I rushed home from school, she’d be lounging on the cushions of our faux vel...
TRIGGER WARNING: This #MeToo essay contains references to child sex trafficking and its effects on the writer. You will cry and, bit by bit, it will break your ...
Soon enough it’s clear he’s hellbent on spreading the rumor he fucked you—or is it fact? You’re a 13-year-old freshman who drank a pint of Southern Comfort, bla...
My mom tells me that I can choose who can come to my party. I can choose who can have cake. Tomorrow when I turn thirteen I will tell her that he can’t come to ...
He was a lurker, an expert lurker, my grandfather. He lurked in the dark, and during the day he lurked in empty corners. My earliest memory is of him, sitting o...
"Diana could not be happy because her mother was a grizzly bear and Diana was a human and they could never understand each other. From the time she learned to s...
My room was the base of operations for Dad’s drug dealing enterprise, a career he must have selected—I imagine in hindsight—to sustain his life as a musician
