Nonfiction

Introduction

1991. A summer storm blows up the coast of Delaware, rearranging the tide on Rehoboth Beach. My husband’s parents take our baby daughter inside, into the house they’ve rented for the week, a box of windows resting on stilts. Released from responsibility, from adulthood, the two of us run into the ocean and give ourselves…

Introduction

In northwestern Montana once, I met a person who changed my mind. This well-published and respected writer had moved to that frontier university town, to teach a four-four load, and to be, I suppose, left the hell alone. The English departments of frontier colleges (I once taught in such a place) are often staffed by…

Fig Leaf

"Well, you have hair on your vagina. That’s a real buzzkill." This was the response my boyfriend, Brian, gave me when some time around our three-month anniversary I got up the courage to address our disappointing sex life. Later that night, when I called an old roommate to confirm that it was normal to have…

Remembering Ray Bourque

Some mornings I try to remember: what is the name of the famous hockey defenseman for the Boston Bruins who, in the last few years of his 22-year career, played for the Colorado Avalanche and who, in his last year of play, was part of a Colorado team that won the Stanley Cup? Ray Bourque….

Trashing Andy Warhol

The senior poet collected things. Porcelain and carved hands, postcards, cobalt glass miniatures, World’s Fair memorabilia, contemporary art. I managed his calendar and his townhouse and his art collection, as well as the more domestic routines of buying groceries and cooking dinner five nights a week—if he wasn’t dining out. He’d made clear in the…

Tempo and Duration

When I was young I used to go to museums with my father in the city where he worked. At the time I didn’t know how to look at art for myself, so often instead of looking at the paintings I just looked at him. I had no idea how art developed and concluded in…

Correspondences

Sex and the dead, Yeats wrote in a letter to Olivia Shakespear, are the only subjects of interest to the studious mind. He was, I suppose, trying to chat her up; and far from the only one to have noticed the links between our comings and goings, the ins and outs of life, such as…

All My Children

I began naming my children when I was four. The habit launched itself via the succession of dolls that were quickly discarded, and the numerous stuffed animals exhausted from affection. There were also objects like the secondhand family car and the rubber plant. Sometimes I named tools like pencils, or apparel like shoes. Naming was…