Napping is divine, but I no longer have all the time in the world.
After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.
I am trying to make sense of this. Survivor's guilt, acceptance, there were words that made me roll my eyes; surely I was too sophisticated for such cliches... So now today I look up the word acceptan...
Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.
Forget career, forget the future, forget existential worries, just get yourselves a couple of dogs, and everything will be all right.
A couple of years ago my sister Judy and I were each given a box of truffles. The tiny print said two pieces contained 310 calories and there were six pieces in each box. We were sitting on the bus he...
There are those people who can eat one piece of chocolate, one piece of cake, drink one glass of wine. There are even people who smoke one or two cigarettes a week. And then there are people for whom...
Sometimes I feel like I'm rescuing a drowning man, and I only have time to rise to the surface for one gasp of air before I go back down again. There is an exhilaration to it, a high born only partly...
It ended sadly. The kind of ending where you wait together, holding hands and weeping, while off in another room, love slowly dies.
He is wearing an old overcoat from the Salvation Army in Easton, Pennsylvania. It cost five bucks ten years ago, Louise remembers. Henry is not interested so much in the bargain, he wants ghosts in hi...
I used to get upset if somebody I didn't like loved a book I loved. That's MY book, I'd think.
I WAS ON A SMALL ISLAND ONCE, IN THE MIDDLE OF a great big lake, mountains all over the place, and as I watched the floating dock the wind kicked up, the waves rose from nowhere, and I imagined myself...
…our bodies often give us electric shocks, sometimes to the tune of dozens a day. It’s not dangerous. We are electric after all, which is hard to remember because inside we are so wet. I breathe in an...
I am trying to convince myself that failure is interesting. I look the word up in the to find its earliest incarnation, but it has always been just ‘failure.’ There’s no Indo-European root meaning or...
The house had been torn down. Nothing is left but the old white fence. There used to be privet bushes everywhere. "The smell of privet is the smell of summer for me," I say to Catherine."Yes, Mom." sh...
The future was also the place where the bad stuff waited in ambush. My children were embarking on their futures in fragile vessels, and I trembled. I wanted to remove obstacles, smooth their way, I wa...
She was tired of relationships whose greatest intimacy consisted of sitting up all night weeping while love died.
Here’s what I love about dogs. They aren’t careful not to disturb you. They don’t overthink. They jump on the bed or the sofa or the chair and plop down. They come and they go. I’m not sure they love...
Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir yo...
I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two specie...