I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do.
I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases...
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.
I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I...
Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice
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...
We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum,...
Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.
Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.
Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.
There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible
The devastation along the Gulf had an inevitability about it: the coast was reverting to its natural state.
Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship’s a little truer That’s where the West begins.
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 seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.
It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.
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...