Browse Topics
Siblings
My Lunatic Brother
I’m sitting in my parents’ living room, listening to my older brother, Ben, tell the family how he’s recently discovered that his phone is being tapped. His tone is casual, even upbeat, as if he were discussing a stretch of unusually good weather.
December 2004
Dear Me
If you are reading this letter, then I have some bad news for you. You’ve always been a straight shooter, so here it is: You have Alzheimer’s.
December 2004
This One’s For Me
All this makes me sound selfish. I have had to make room for this selfishness inside me, to accept the fact that alongside the Sue who cares deeply, grieves excessively, and fights fiercely for her siblings is the Sue who seethes beneath her horsehair shirt. People like Mother Teresa must practice selflessness until there is no self left to practice on.
November 2004
The Beauty Of Second Avenue
The foyer was home to my mother’s books but a place of exile for my brother and me. Around the time I was eleven and he seven, my mother began banishing us, singly, to the foyer without dinner in fits of unpredictable, unfathomable rage.
October 2004
The Rat
“Rat check,” my father would say when he came home from work. And we would run to the various traps to see if we’d caught the rat. We slept lightly, each hoping and fearing that we would hear the slam of the trap in the night and be the one to go running with the news that the rat at last was dead. But we found nothing, heard nothing.
September 2004
Land Of Plenty
Forty dollars a week, my mother’s salary before taxes in 1954, could barely feed my brother and me. For sixty-seven cents, however, she could buy a box of fertilizer that would nourish her plants all summer.
May 2004
Two Essays
Having failed to pay the rent for three months, my mother, my little brother, and I came home to find an eviction notice on our trailer. The front door was barred.
May 2004
Red Eggs
I am eleven, not quite a little girl, not quite a young woman. There are things I know that I should not know, things of which I am not to speak, such as: I am not supposed to know that my father is a checkout clerk, not the grocery-store manager. I am not supposed to know the dolls I play with are stolen.
March 2004
My Brother The Superhero
At dinner, Brandon — my son, your nephew — tells us how, on the kickball diamond today, he was called a pussy by Arthur, the decidedly overweight bully (as all second-grade bullies tend to be, complete with requisite learning disability). Since September, Arthur has developed an unfortunate interest in Brandon.
March 2004
Turning Thirty
Hiking the Appalachian Trail, shoplifting, feeling grateful for being alive in this world of difficult beauty
January 2004
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today