Unrequited love is the best kind. But I can tell you with certainty, Robbie, that the other kind of love, the kind I received from your father for more than two decades, is far more necessary.
Presenting me with a ring box, in which, instead of a ring, were a dozen old library cards—a symbol for love that could be borrowed, perhaps, but never kept.
At nine, she had begun to see a truer picture of me than Polly could. She had begun to see what I saw—not beauty, but imperfections. I let her pull away from me.
Fucking parking spot. The woman hauled herself out of the front seat. Her face wrinkled with the effort and her small, old eyes leaked and blinked in the sun. Your father took a step back. He stood fo...
I felt not jealousy so much as shame for not understanding the bond between them. The bond that was stalwart in the face of complacency and cruelty and wandering desire. The habit of each other that w...
Being born with only one kidney, occurring in roughly one in two thousand people.
[we] made love, though it was a stretch to call it that. I was making love, I think; he was taking what I made.
I wondered why I had been so set on tall men. There were only three inches of height separating this man and me—if I turned around we would be almost eye to eye—and yet that felt exactly right. He
Watching you together—your hair and eyes, your flesh and bone, your three bodies so frank and solid in the world—gave me immeasurable pleasure. It was pleasure derived not from parental pride, but fro...
He somehow knew it was more important to be reassuring, to seem to be in command of the situation, than to be right. And he was always willing to give in when he was found out to be wrong. The
If I expected to be forgiven myself, I would have to forgive indiscriminately from now on. I
They say the human body can lose 50 percent of its body parts and survive. But it depends on which parts, and which body.
If, when I looked, I was not perfect, how could I be beautiful? And if I was not beautiful, how could I be loved?
The photo is there in the hatbox, evidence that all the people I love best in the world were once in the same house, at the same time, healthy and whole, celebrating the season together.
Standing there, I came face-to-face with the unwelcome finality of death. What can you do with it? It stops you cold when you think of it; it leaves you no out.
It was pleasure derived not from parental pride, but from gratitude. We had been blessed by the existence on this earth of our three particular children, and we had been assigned a blessed task in kee...
The alliance of my father and brother and me seemed to trump normal adolescent activities. I was more often at home than out with my friends, and any entanglements I had with boys, I kept secret. My e...
A man like that, I thought, would take you in hand. A man like that would keep you safe from yourself. Was it love at first sight? Not exactly. But it was a haven in the storm.
When we arrived at the hospital, you were in a medically induced coma, which I was made to understand was a sort of freezing of you, a fabricated reprieve from your own body that would allow your inte...
Confessions. For whose benefit besides one’s own?
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