“How do you survive the unendurable? Marro’s gorgeous debut is about war, grief, guilt, and grappling with the truths you don’t expect, and finally taking the risk and acknowledging the ones that you do. Moving and full of heart.”—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You
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Spark
A Woman Walks Away
I had never heard of Barbara Newhall Follett until I read this article by Daniel Mills in the LA Review of Books but now I can’t stop thinking about her.
But is it Art?
I didn’t think much about art as I slaved away on Casualties. I did worry plenty plenty about being published.
I wanted to be chosen.
Writing While Old
A new book, an intriguing magazine, and my ex mother-in-law
Names and the Stories They Hold
The whole process got me thinking about names – the importance we give to them and the outright hubris it takes to impose a name on another living being.
The Evil in Our Hearts
Elroy is the kind of man who talks about his breaking-entering-and-panty-sniffing days with the same unblinking stare and flattened affect as he talks about his mother’s murder. It’s unnerving. Yet…
Small Talk, Big Talk, Beautiful Questions
“What does it feel like to kiss romantically, to want to go to bed with a man?” I tried to answer the best way I could. I know it wasn’t enough. It probably could never be enough. Her question, though, was a gift. Nadia got me to step outside of my comfort zone and dig deep, to look with new eyes at love — and how to try to explain how an orgasm felt to a woman who had never had one.
We Are All Butterflies
I didn’t lift a finger to determine who my parents would be, my race, my gender, my prospects for good health, or the country into which I’d be born, yet all of these factors and more shaped what has followed.
It all came down to chance. The spin of a wheel. The roll of some dice. A lottery.
Finding The Parts That Remain
These past two weeks, I’ve been moving through places that I have thought of as home, steeping myself in the memories each one contains. The journey left me wondering if I even know what home truly is. The answer was no clearer when I got off the plane in San Diego on Monday night. Instead, it felt like washing up onto a foreign shore.
Waking Up in the Dark
I’m going to write this week about journaling. I warn you though, at any minute, I could go dark, really dark. Four o’clock in the morning dark, a time with which I’ve become intimately and reluctantly acquainted.