Death, he wrote, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.
But perhaps it is presumptuous of me to assume that they will be missing something. Perhaps in retrospect this has been a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promis...
Bringing him back had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. Seeing it clearly did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he w...
Always when I play back my father’s voice, Maria says, it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one o...
Tell me, a rabbi asked Daniel Bell when he said, as a child, that he did not believe in God. Do you think God cares?)
Pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again.
[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the mult...
We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.
We closed the deal and moved to New York.Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so prof...
We are not idealized wild things.We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn,...
We all remember what we need to remember.
Vanish.Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.Go back into the blue.I myself placed her ashes in the wall.I myself saw the ca...
Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.
To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.
This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fort...
There is an airport in Hermosillo, and Hermosillo is only eighty-five miles about Guaymas, but to fly is to miss the point. The point is to become disoriented, shriven, by the heat and the deceptive p...
There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden.Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.