Walter didn’t know what to make of his two boys. If you looked at it a certain way, then the one who needed the beatings to toughen him up, namely Joey, never did a thing to earn a beating, because he...
This was an aspect of Barbie-hood that Mary had never given any thought to, that Barbie created Ken, anatomically incorrect to the very core of his brain, where he understood as well as he understood...
She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publ...
Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn’t look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was...
One signal conversation, which she had lingered near for ten minutes, between two woman German professors, had concerned a support group they both belonged to for people with an overwhelming compulsio...
It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.
I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it...
I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have reached the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don't think it is the years themselves, or the disi...
Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people’s heroic self-regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of...
That there is such pleasure in enmity that after a while it cannot be left off even if one would will it. Another thing is also true, that when a quarrel is new, one’s friends hold one back, and give...
Who you are shapes how you are loved.
The plant succession that had begun in March with snowdrops and early crocuses would soon flicker out in a blaze of orange chrysanthemums and show its last pinpoints of color in bittersweet and ash be...
Northerners, even abolitionists, knew more about how and why to chop down the slavery tree than they ever knew what to do with its sour fruit.
I’m not strange to myself, but I realize that I contrast with others fairly sharply.
Dean Harstad had unbounded patience, the very patience that drove Chairman X bananas, patience as a weapon.
Arthur said, You must know that you don't love children for being good or bad. I know you know that.Why do you love them?Because you do, said Arthur. Because they don't know what's coming and maybe yo...
I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily lif...
The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.
What do you think makes you start laughing and unable to stop?
We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them.