It was not that he felt that the world would damage or hurt Frankie in any way, it was much more that there were plenty of things out in the world that Frankie would learn about, and that he would the...
I dream about standing in the lunch line naked. It's always the lunch line in ninth grade.Nakedness dreams are very common.I suppose they are.
A moment later, Jackie lifts himself into a canter. It is analyzable - I have seen the picture of how he steps so far under with his supporting hind leg that he is placing it right beneath where I am...
When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best frien...
War is inevitable when the world is fallen. If you stop one, another will start. Redemption is the only path away from war.
Those Latin American and Eastern European novelists aren’t any help here. They live inside the mansion of female desire as if it is their right. Their own desire is a nice healthy dog on a string, rea...
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...
The state fair was all very well, but it shouldn’t be the last thing you saw in your life. At first you thought of people like Eloise and Frank and Lillian as runaways, and then, after a bit, you knew...
She didn't relate this memory to Janet, but she did think right then that all golden ages are discovered within. No one would ever know that her father, Carl, the endless Iowa horizon, a pan of shortb...
It was imperative that the growing discord in our family be made to appear minor. The indication that my father truly was beside himself was the way he had carried his argument with us to others. But...
I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don’t, sort of puffs you up.
All those cows with the same pattern of black and white, all turning their heads at the same time, all mooing in unison (his first love was still cloning) and all feeling pregnant when they were not,...
You know when we came out of the clinic, and we saw those flower beds that we hadn’t seen when we were walking in? That was so unexpected, I think it made me delirious somehow. And then it seemed like...
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...
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...
JOE COULDN’T STAND the noise. The giant room they
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...
I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.