He seemed to be having trouble remembering the steps, for he was pumping my arm and counting under his breath (one, two, three), and his breath smelled like the open maws of the pub cellars that grape...
I'm not sure what the moral of the bathroom-stool story is. Perhaps this: it's a good idea to settle for a few loose ends, because even if everything in your life is connected to everything else, that...
This was the real thing, boys in the flesh. All the prohibitions, especially the ones that stayed unvoiced, had made boys much more exotic; it was as though we'd never met one. The whole school hummed...
Man and wife, realist and dreamer ... n truth they were more than one flesh, they had formed and sustained each other, they had ONE STORY between them and it wasn't at all easy for me or my brother to...
It's said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you'll never learn t...
The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interes...
Did they love me? The question is beside the point, somehow. Certainly they each spoiled me, mainly by giving me the false impression that I was entitled to attention nearly all the the time. They pla...
The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too - all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have vir...
Like many who'd married in the war, my parents were finding it hard to survive the peace. This wasn't because they had discovered that they didn't love each other once their life together wasn't spice...
More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside.
