Her people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready — so who was she to advise me on anything?
Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out! It was for many years my family’s habit to drive from North Carolina to western New York State to visit the relatives we had left behind. After spending ten days with my mother’s...
For the first sixteen years we were together, I'd give Hugh chocolates for Valentine's Day, and he'd give me a carton of cigarettes. Both of us got exactly what we wanted, and it couldn't have been ea...
Fly enough, and you learn to go brain-dead when you have to. It’s sort of like time travel. One minute you’re bending to unlace your shoes,and the next thing you know you’re paying fourteen dollars fo...
Don't tell me I don't know how to hate,' I wanted to say. Then I stopped and asked myself, 'Do you really want that to be your message? Think you can out-hate me, asshole? I was fucking hating people...
Do you have a feel for the guitar? Do you have any idea what this little baby is capable of? Without waiting for an answer, he climbed up into his chair and began playing Light My Fire, adding, This o...
Boxes of records made me think that LPs should be outlawed or at least limited to five per person, and I soon came to despise the type who packs even her empty shampoo bottles, figuring she’ll sort th...
Bitch, I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be all right. We’ll get through this shit, motherfucker, just you wait.
At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe?
Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but o...
All these young mothers chauffeuring their volcanic three-year-olds through the grocery store. The child's name always sounds vaguely presidental, and he or she tends to act accordingly. Mommy hears w...
After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it...
A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.
A few hours laterDad called again. The vet had put his Great Dane, Sophie, on antibiotics, and, figuring it was all basically the same thing, he had started taking them. I'm just not sure of the dose,...
I like the trail that the Internet created. For example, I was watching one of those Douglas Sirk movies, and I noticed that Rock Hudson towered over everyone, and I typed in "How tall was" and I saw...
It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. "A bow tie announces to the world...
The taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.
Never fall asleep in a Dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get old, never get drunk near a train, and never, under any circumstances, cut off y...
Living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you...
His voice was high and strange, as if it had been recorded and was now being played back at a faster speed.