GIFTS
It’s my birthday! And two days ago, the proof of my fairy tale collection The Poof! Academy arrived in the mail, just as I’d hoped—the best birthday gift ever! At long last I’m able to hold my first book in my hand. At noon Ella took a…
NEW NORMAL
It’s a beautiful spring day, preternaturally clear and bright—or so it seems to me, since the sky is freer of smog than at any time within memory. I’ve opened the back door and bathroom window, creating a gentle cross breeze as I work at my desk. Because it’s been...
HAVEN
There had been one bright spot in my life in California:
My very first day of eighth grade at Garfield Junior High—now Martin Luther King Middle School—my homeroom teacher asked the girl two desks in front of me to help me find…
THE FRYING PAN OR THE FIRE?
In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:
I went back to Minnesota the summer after eighth grade with the secret resolve that I was going to stay. I didn’t tell my mother, of course, or she would never have let me leave. I didn’t even tell…
LOCKDOWN
Ella and I, fierce critics, used to creep furtively upstairs on occasion—after the workers had left—to see how the conversion was progressing. We saw the new configurations of the three apartments above us when only the two-by-fours were in place, and later…
SHAMED
In California, my mother became someone I didn’t recognize. She was alternately hysterical and wrathful, haranguing and disparaging and blaming both Doug and me, though most of what she accused us of, I eventually came to realize, were things she mistakenly thought...