There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the t...
Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.
My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as Joan’s husband. Marriage is the classic betrayal.
Misinformation about rattlesnakes is a leitmotiv of the insomniac imagination in Los Angeles.
Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.
I have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it.
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead...
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing...
Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you.
The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.
The bereaved must be urged to sit in a sunny room, preferably one with an open fire.
Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.
I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.
He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at t...
And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the...
Nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meanin...
My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I wou...
Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.