Nonfiction

These are my best days. We’ve ditched class, my boyfriend Paul and I, and are smoking a fat little joint on a stone bench in Rancho San Rafael, the park near his apartment in Reno. The sun is bright and the sky is cloudless and the hills around the city are bald. It’s like I’m…

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. —Hebrews 11:1 1. Morphine makes me small, airborne. Like a spider. I rest in a high corner of the ceiling, look down on my body on the white hospital bed. It was just one shot, one needle through my skin….

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….

"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…

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…

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…

In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss…

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…

In the summer of 1991, I was on the beach in Los Angeles. I should have been home in New York, caring for sick friends, but I had won a grant and fled a boyfriend and I was living for a few months with two friends in Hollywood. One afternoon we went to Santa Monica,…