For twenty-two years Sabine had told her stories to one person, so that the action and the telling had become inseparable. What was left was half a life, the one where she lived it but had nothing lat...
For the guests of Mr. Hosokawa’s birthday party, most of the day was spent wandering from window to window, maybe playing a hand of cards or looking at a magazine, as if the world had become a giant t...
Even if you have it all together you can’t know where you’re going to end up. There are too many forces, as deep and invisible as tides, that keep us bouncing into places where we never thought we’d w...
Eternal rest, grant unto her, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and all the souls of the faithfully departed rest in peace. Amen.
Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Th...
Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the...
But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past...
But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forge...
But for this— She stopped herself. He didn’t know. Where is he now? Marina asked. She could not bring herself to say his body. Anders was not a body. Vogel was full of doctors, doctors working, doctor...
But Rose, for all her incalculable wisdom, was still a dog, and we could not reassure her that something really hideous wasn’t about to happen. Maybe she did think that, behind the door of examination...
But Lucy had been alone too much of her life, and in her loneliness she had constructed a vision of what a perfect relationship would look like. Love, in her imagination, was so dazzling, so tender an...
Because while Leo Posen appeared to be perfectly sober, she would be that he seemed that way regardless of how much he had drunk. Some men were like that. They went from sober to more or less dead wit...
At home, the puppy Rose played with balls, struggled with the stairs, and slept behind my knees while we watched in adoration. It’s not that I was unhappy in what I now think of as the dogless years,...
As if music were a separate thing you could drive yourself into, make love to, fuck.
All I had ever wanted was a dog who would sleep in my lap while I read and lick my neck and bring me the ball to throw eighty-seven times in a row. I thought a dog would be the key to perfect happines...
After her death, at the age of thirty-nine, I wrote a book about us. I wrote it as a way to memorialize her and mourn her, and as a way of keeping her own important memoir, Autobiography of a Face, al...
That it was so completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else.
While every insect in the Amazon lifted its head from the leaf it was masticating and turned a slender antenna in her direction. She was a snack plate, a buffet line, a woman dressed for springtime in...
Whenever possible, you need to go to the primary source to make your decisions. Regardless of whether or not you’re a student, it is never enough to rely on other people’s ideas. You have to look at t...
To never have to look at someone who was remembering when you have made such a concerted effort to forget.