Explore

I hadn’t always liked being around my mother while she was alive.

Please, Theresa thought, as a tenderness surged within herself.

We hung our posters at the drugstore, at the grocery, at city hall. I tacked up a 1970s Earth Day poster from my mother’s classroom. We tie-dyed shirts, and I bought everyone a plastic visor to paint.

Subtract for the cigarettes, the bourbon, the sleepless nights.

Why does she do it? She knows cutting yourself is a joke. Goth, idiotic.

Our lives are often shaped by small, seemingly trivial choices.

I wanted from my father what I had never wanted or sought: his advice.

Writing is a subversive activity that exempts you from the rules.

My advice can be succinctly expressed in three words: Persist, persist, persist!

It was the sixties, and I was in
college and incredibly restless.

Follow your dog, and you might just live to write for another day.

Abandon the idea that arts and sciences are mutually exclusive.

Reviewers are curs and their opinions are not to be taken seriously.

Getting answers is easy. The difficult thing is knowing the right questions.

You can get anyone to sleep with you—if you want it bad enough.

My advice is to take advice with a grain of salt.

Betrayal was written on my face, in my eyes, and I knew it.

The sunrise does not blaze fiercely but spreads in a gentle flush.

Maybe she’s gay. I wonder if she masturbates when I’m out of the room.

Pete gazes into his mother’s soul and finds a piece of smoldering coal.

In your postpartum state, your best hope is to bluff your way through.

If a friend’s family is persecuted, call Sinn Fein on that number.

The engineers seemed ripe for mockery, some more than others.

Books are territory of the hands, hands that shook my spine.

Your bookself will appear to find you trivial, its nose deep in some tome.

The story is filled with demarcations, limits, invisible as well as overt.

On her wedding day Ellen accidently locked herself inside the pantry.

Be glad the numbness in your legs isn’t reading on your face.

This Lee was a woman, and she was a painter, and she was good.

I realize now that hers was the face that taught me what driving was.