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 a metal diving suit. What I ne...
There was a diet center that sported a plywood cutout of a pink pig wearing a brick-red polka-dot dress. The bubble coming from the pig’s mouth held this phrase: A New Way To Lose Weight Without Starv...
The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.
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 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...
That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. Your s...
She holds every dress briefly by its shoulders like it’s a schoolkid she’s checking out for smudges before church. Then one by one they get flung away from her and into the fire.
Now try writing some pages to serve as later notes. Because you’re not yet sure of voice or anything else, you’re free from the need to squash in all manner of background information, explaining what...
None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.
No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dolla...
Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.
It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy—getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff---get undercut by having to play footba...
In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.
I spent nine hard, exasperating, concentrated months on the first chapter of Liars’ Club alone, which was essentially time developing that voice—a watchmaker’s minuscule efforts, noodling with syntax...
I put just a teaspoon of catshit in your sandwich, but you didn’t notice it at all. To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around...
I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.
His silence hadn’t been helplessness—it hadn’t even been love. It had been pity.
Height - ours and our boyfriends - is a running contest between Lecia and me. If I tell her good news about myself, she's liable to say 'I'm five-nine' and hang up.
God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie.I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase or . That has a neo-Nazi ring to it.I lik...