Every illness is not a set of pathologies but a personal story
One night when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking for some reason, about Treasure Island. I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, somethin...
It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both pres...
Dan Murphy's diagnosis added Lia Lee to a distibguished line of epileptics that has inlcuded Soren Kierkegaard, Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all of whom,...
After a few months went by, Dee started leaving her own baby with Foua when she took Lia to medical appointments-perhaps the first instance in the history of Child Protective Services that a foster mo...
A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the gre...
Wine stores should organize their bottles not by origin and varietal but by alcohol content and intensity of flavor,
He never had fewer than seven jobs and at one point had thirteen.
You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will...
Their tastes change not because their palates improve but because they deteriorate.
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the libr...
I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet.
It would never have occurred to them to emulate Luis Estevez, a pediatrician at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, who has referred Puerto Rican and Dominican patients to a Santeria high priest as he migh...
If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality...
Every Hmong has a different version of what is commonly called The Promise: a written or oral contract, made by CIA personnel in Laos, that if they fought for the Americans, the Americans would aid th...
Also, although the great majority of the letters I’ve received from Hmong readers have been positive, most of the negative ones have criticized me for telling a story that was not mine to tell. I am n...
In the midst of the tumult, part ecstasy and part panic, into which all first-time mothers are thrown by sleep deprivation and headlong identity realignment.
Believed in carnal love. To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wanton...
Wasn’t education a matter of infusing one’s life with flavorful essences, pressing out the impurities, and leaving only a little sludge at the bottom?