But is truth the same as memory?
When you seek it, you cannot find it. We
Confessions. For whose benefit besides one’s own?
Let’s all throw unhappiness overboard.
Confessions. For whose benefit besides one’s own? T
First sight of him at the bar, the shock of him under my ribs.
It is upon the rubble of ancient history that today stands
I became a great internal shrug. All my organs gave way to the path of least resistance. I felt myself dislocating, but the dislocation did not have the expected result. Instead of removing me, it mad...
We found a room in a motel close to the hospital, the Mermaid Inn, a pink stucco affliction squeezed between a Starbucks and an independent bookstore.
Sunflowers face the sun all the time in the day even if the sun moves. They were not actually sunflowers—they were prince daisies—but I wasn’t going to correct her. Where did you learn that? I asked h...
I had misplaced you, and now I was losing them, too. Then
Already I sensed that to claim him, to take something of him without asking, would be to drive him away. When
We can achieve happiness not by remaking ourselves, but by subverting unhappiness. By throwing it overboard.
Knew it wasn’t the right kind of love, because it required nothing of me. I did not need to worry about keeping it alive or putting it out since it was kept alive quite independently of anything I mig...
It’s true—I don’t really believe in mistakes. There’s only what you do, and what you don’t do, isn’t there? It was a mistake to the extent anything like that is a mistake. The before and after of it l...
I should never have confessed. I should have wiped my one indiscretion—one indiscretion in more than twenty years—from my conscience,
What happens to a marriage? A persistent failure of kindness, triggered at first, at least in my case, by the inequities of raising children, the sacrifices that take a woman by surprise and that she...
I would need to be not so much myself as the person I felt inside me who had so far not been unleashed. He
I had the feeling I always have when God and death become entwined—that God is stepping in to steal the thunder of a human affair, a glorious union of flesh and blood, the miracle of two bodies making...
I don’t want something different, I said, and I meant it. And not just about the ring, but about our twenty-one years of marriage. The people we’d made. The life we’d shaped together, exactly the life...