Browse Sections
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Bruised
I wander off the basketball court, the pain rising and crinkling into stars. There are bits of garbled conversation, my own heaving breath. No blood that I can feel — but space, I need space, to be away from other bodies, to be alone in my own blood-heavy, throbbing body.
January 2012
Letter To Josh’s Mom
I have a folder of her letters. It’s behind the tax returns and the manuals to DVD players long since broken. Nearly every letter Josh’s mom has ever sent me is in that folder: seventeen in all, in chronological order.
December 2011
Stateless
In the house where I grew up, the war never ended. All of us were infected with hatred. This was their real legacy. If my mother and grandmother had been pearl divers, I would be able to hold my breath for a very long time. But they were Holocaust survivors, so instead I have an infinite capacity for hatred.
December 2011
First Empty Your Cup
Nikkō has many temples and pagodas, but the architecture didn’t move me. It was the forest; it was the quiet. It was obvious why this had been a sacred Buddhist site for more than a millennium. You could feel it. There was an interiority to the forest, a layering of quiet. The temples; the forest; you. And the snow, yet another layer, placing a hush on everything, taking you one step farther inside. I shivered. I lingered there by a shogun-era drum tower, its flared roof dusted in snow, a stand of cedars rising above it.
December 2011
I Got Off The Beaten Path (But So Did Everyone Else)
I had arrived at the peak hour of the morning commute, and a vibrating throng of mopeds clustered along the dirt road, every few seconds releasing one of its number single file onto the bridge. If rush hour in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station is Asia’s most spectacular, then here, at the threshold of this narrow bridge over the Nam Khan, was its most intimate.
November 2011
Drag
Although I believe I know how to have fun (camping is fun), I have recently started to suspect that some people consider me a “drag.” I’ve begun to consider myself a drag, especially when I can’t take a measly half day off without my conscience bugging me.
November 2011
Baby Lollipops
It was the year they found a dead toddler in the bushes, head bashed in, bite marks and cigarette burns all over his body. He was wearing a T-shirt with multicolored lollipops across the front. It was November 1990.
November 2011
In The Air
I opened the fridge, then closed it. I called a friend and told her what had happened, then called another and repeated the account. I paced the small hallway between my kitchen and my office, then walked back and forth in the living room, but everywhere I went, the emptiness kept coming, and the air felt thin. The hot edge of desperation clung to my skin, making my breath shallow.
November 2011Agonizing Grace
“Do you feel you’re a danger to yourself or others?” Dr. Lyman G. Glandy, head psychiatrist at Fairview Psychiatric Hospital, wants to know. He’s interviewing me for the first time since my arrival here three days ago. We’re in my room, a small, Spartan, dimly lit chamber with all the charm of a prison cell.
October 2011
Light, Held Together By Water
Finally I slumped in a chair and sobbed. To grieve one death is always to grieve two. Impolite to admit, I may have been weeping mostly for myself.
October 2011
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today