You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up, she asked plaintively, and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?
What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn’t have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.
There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their...
The value of money is a scam perpetuated by those who have it over those who don't.
Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. I'd come to see the heavens, our father always said. But the stars were in her eyes, a line that used to plea...
One morning I was bicycling to class when a large flock of Canada geese passed overhead. I couldn't see them, or much of anything else, but I heard the jazzy honking.
No one would have liked that. Maybe I liked it even less. Here we go again, I said to myself. I said this so distinctly in my head that I heard it as well as said it. As if I was quite used to finding...
My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face.
I’d no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential—I was torn between the two.
It was long past time to change the subject. The boy playing the bagpipes is really good, Prudie said.If only she’d said it in French! Trey made a delighted noise. Nessa Trussler. A girl. Or something...
I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.
How was your day, Rosie? Dad would ask when he came home from work and I’d tell him it was ebullient. Or limpid. Or dodecahedron. That’s good to hear, he’d say.
At twenty-two, I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself.
An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.
There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up...
You might be shown the photos of the space chimps in their helmets, grinning from ear to ear, and you might feel an urge to tell the rest of your class that chimps grin like that only when they’re fri...
When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.
We sat around our own table, an island of sad reflection in an ocean of merry din.
The storm which blew me out of my past eased off. —FRANZ KAFKA, A Report for an Academy
IN MOST FAMILIES, there is a favorite child. Parents deny it and maybe they truly don’t see it, but it’s obvious to the children. Unfairness bothers children greatly. It’s hard to always come in secon...