I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for Ameri...
I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.
Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice
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...
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...
What we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention.
One more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen.
Why make this call and not just say what you wanted?His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.
What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one pl...
What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before?
They worry a great deal about 'responding to one another with beauty and tenderness,' and their response to one another is in fact so tender that an afternoon at the school tends to drift perilously i...
There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible
Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship’s a little truer That’s where the West begins.
Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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.
Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.
It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for...
In New Orleans they have mastered the art of the motionless. In