I couldn't have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mo...
He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.
Far as I can tell, a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
Every day I feel more like some defeated matador limping out of the arena after I've been gored, or like some general coming back from a long battle.
Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you're born to, which opposes what little I've garnered about comportment. I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you...
During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing...
But most of the time, we keep memories packed away. I sometimes liken that moment of sudden unpacking to circus clowns pouring out of a miniature car trunk—how did so much fit into such a small space?
But because of you, I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue—not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless
And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you’ll write down in...
Sister was. But I couldn’t resist such a clear shot. So I said her
Sentimentality is only emotion you haven’t proven to the reader—emotion without vivid evidence.
Her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not
Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.
Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve m...
Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being.
The week the local paper carried a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and n...
The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain
The difference between mad people and sane people, Brave Orchid explained to the children, is that sane people have variety when they talk story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and...
The creature you find in Speak, Memory is rare enough to be zoo-worthy. He’s not just smarter but somehow more effete than most of us without seeming put on. Resenting him for it would be like resenti...