Nonfiction

“This structure has two helical chains each coiled around the same axis…It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairings we have postulated immediately suggest a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” —J. D. Watson and Francis Crick, on their discovery of the structure of DNA.   I.  In 1972, my father-in-law, Ron,…

First in a series of essays called, collectively, My Mother’s Story. My mother, Kathleen Klin Phoa circa 1948. Fact. A student at St. Mary’s Canossian secondary school in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Fact.   Despite the hiatus that was the war, she was still a girl. Oh, she knew she was almost a woman, but inside,…

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago.   You probably know these lines, either from Christina Rossetti’s poem of 1871 or, more likely, Holst’s setting of them as a carol. I used one of them as the title of a book, “bleak” altered to “deep” by the…

One Friday night, the winter I was twelve, my mom’s brother, Tío Erwin, showed up at my grandmother’s apartment in Jamaica Plain with his new wife. She was fifteen. They’d met during his recent trip to Guatemala. She looked like any one of my cousins, only she didn’t weigh as much. Her smile stretched, revealing…

I’m staring at a rush of players on the screen—fragments of knees and shoulders, a collision of helmets—when the two aides in front of me leap from their seats and yell, “Go go go,” as if they’re rallying with fans under a blue dome of sky rather than with patients in pajamas and robes in…

We thought we were onto something new. We loved doing it in the out-of-doors, thought ourselves pioneers: the first to sneak off into the darkness, unzip the fly, to feel a breeze on the back of our necks, to open our mouths, our hearts, his heart. We were partial to certain places: the park, the…

I enter my name into a search engine. There are 3,700 results. The word torture appears in most of them. I read the blogs. I read the comments that follow. I find more blogs. I pretend those don’t bother me either. I check e-mail, thirty-eight new messages. Mr. Fair, I’m not at all sure why…

1. The motel over the bridge could be demolished as early as spring, and a dollar store there overlooking the river and what I saw—a woman propped between two men. Her body looked stiffly drunk or drugged the way she was hustled upright with the posture of a fence. Held up by the men, like…

Many years ago, I decided to make an adventure movie about my family that had nothing to do with me. The family would live in the trees and swing from room to room making the leaves whistle, making the birds flustered. They would live there all year round, even in the snow, and when it…