JOURNEY ALONG THE EDGE OF THE UNDERWORLD

From Conde Nast Traveler

For as long as I can remember, my father has been explaining the world to me, taking it apart and putting it back together like a puzzle. He speaks in deep time, millions and billions of years, and as he speaks, great mountain ranges rise and disappear….

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UNFORGOTTEN ITALY

From More Magazine

I went to Todi, a Medieval hilltop town in Umbria, to reclaim my Italian, a language I learned when I was 16, had mastered as an exchange student by 18 but had abandoned by 24. During the long interregnum between then and now, I have imagined dreamily the alternative life in which my love of Italian would have thrived….

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AND THEN CAME HEATHER

From Cookie Magazine

At 2 months old, Livia was a colicky baby who would only stop crying if at my breast or near the loud, rumbling sound of an 18-wheeler. Twenty hours a day, she would cry. My sister, who lived nearby and who was pregnant with her second child, would not visit, so afraid was she that her baby would be like mine. My husband had a teaching job in another state and lived there most of the week. I suffered chronic mastitis that left me sick and with suspicious lumps in my breast that needed to be aspirated. The apartment was a mess, my daughter’s fingernails were long and scratched her, and I was living on brownies….

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LET NOTHING YOU DISMAY

From the New York Times

In my mother’s basement, the Christmas after my grandmother had died, I found the top of a box that had belonged to her. My mother and I were down there retrieving ornaments and lights so that we could decorate the tree, a painful Christmas that year, 1995. My stepfather had died not long before my grandmother. The box top — 18 inches by 18 inches, watermarked, frayed and torn — had once covered a wreath, but the wreath was long gone, and now the box held ornaments, each one neatly wrapped in tissue. I lifted the lid off the box, and immediately I noticed my grandmother’s handwriting, a jumble of words that spilled out to fill the room. My mother would later tell me that she had known about the box top but had never read it, that after seeing her mother’s handwriting she had shut the lid: Pandora’s box. But I could not shut the lid. I had to know what was written there.

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REAL FRUSTRATIONS TRAVERSE A FICTIONAL REALM

From The New York Times Writers on Writing Series

My stepfather, Dan Sullivan, came into my life when I was 4, driving a turquoise Cadillac with electric windows that hummed like flies as he put them up and down. He was a poker-playing Texan who won big and shared those winnings generously, throwing the cash into the air so that it fluttered to the ground beautifully before us — my mother, sisters and me.

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SUNDAY DINNER

From Life Magazine

It exists in our collective consciousness as something warm and wonderful: the family sitting together at the table, passing around bowls of aromatic food, discussing the events of the day, the weather, nothing at all. The image is informed, perhaps, by Norman Rockwell, or by Leave It to Beaver, or by memories of our own youth. In our reverie, we wonder if it ever really was as good and true as we envision it, and if it could possibly be replicated in the harried, hurried world that we live in today. Can we bring back Sunday Dinner?…

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HOW TO AVOID DIVORCE

From Self Magazine

I married the same man twice in four months, and over the span of 18 months we went on seven honeymoons. We traveled to New Hampshire to watch the leaves change; we skied at Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies; we sipped tea in Morocco and trekked on camels through the Sahara; we spent Easter in Seville, Spain; we toured London’s museums; we strolled the streets of Amsterdam’s red-light district; we watched kites illuminated by candles sail in the night sky above the Ganges River like so many stars. We had no money (he’s a poet and I’m a novelist), but we’re dreamers, and we patched the trips together in one way and another…

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