The fall of 1991, as my boyfriend and I drove from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania to Virginia to West Virginia to Vermont and then all along the northern route through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and California, the one consistent thing we witnessed from town to town and city to city…
My books, when I was a child, were populated with fairy godmothers, magic princes, wizards who would make your wishes come true with a wave of a wand or a few abracadabras. Inside these color-saturated pages, the characters took trips to far-off lands where spine-tingling adventures awaited. It was a fantasy beyond my own wildest…
“It was a dungeon,” Marvin Gilmore said about Boston State Hospital. “Like something out of medieval times.” Located on 232 acres of farmland, it began its therapeutic tenure in the late nineteenth century with promise, with the idea that a quiet pastoral setting outside the bustling city would do wonders for the lost and the…
In 1946, setting out to write the memoirs of his most remarkable life, Arthur Koestler walked into the Times publishing offices in Printing House Square London. In a small cubicle overlooking the Thames, while, as he said, a tugboat wailed longingly for the sea, Koestler examined the newspapers of the day, month, and year of…
Years ago, in the liminality of early transition, I worked a brief labor job. I hadn’t started hormones and looked like, what until recently I had been: a dyke. At the café where I hung out was a private contractor, with a crew of macho-seeming mostly Hispanic workers, doing construction and remodeling. He liked the…
I saw him when I entered the lobby. A tall man, sitting down. American or Australian or British. Young but not that young. Starting to bald. He had what the Japanese called a tall nose. When he stood, his body arched, then kept going, reminding me of a solitary egret, uncomfortable in rumpled feathered skin….
Over the past decade, my taste in literature—or at least my engagement with it—has shifted dramatically. I spend most of my “reading time” reciting charming and insufferable tales to my children. Curious George, for instance, is both the account of an irascible chimp unleashed in the big city and the chilling tale of interspecies abduction….
The night before my husband and I agreed to get married, we fought. It was a stupid and terrible argument. I’d planned a whole proposal for the next day: rented a rowboat, bought a bottle of champagne, measured his finger while he slept and had a wooden ring made. When he confessed, after a few…
In the Boston of inherited wealth, the five fetching Rotch daughters were raised in a Commonwealth Avenue mansion in the same Back Bay neighborhood as the Crosby and Bigelow families. The eldest daughter, Josephine, was engaged to marry Albert Bigelow the day after Bert’s graduation from Harvard. But when Josie and her mother sailed to…
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