“I told you last nigh that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and said, You aren’t […]

What binds together mothers and daughters? What makes them clutch so hard they wound each other and love so hard they wound themselves? Perhaps I’m biased, but our mother is not only our first love, she’s our first hurt. Our mothers serve as models, templates of women we hope to be, maybe the women […]

I am beyond thrilled that the amazing folks at HarperPerrenial (quite frankly the whole team is genius when it comes to publishing and marketing paperbacks) for bringing out my memoir in paperback. The jacket is a sharp departure from the hardcover, and I’m pleased with the softer treatment. This is not to say that […]

“I wanted him gone from our home so as to be done with him. I wanted him dead too, so that if I couldn’t stop thinking about him and worrying about when would be the next time I’d see him, at least his death would put an end to it. I wanted to kill […]

I’ve finally completed the first draft of the prologue of my new novel, Women and Children First. My first piece of new fiction since 2004. Gulp. Now the terror that is Chapter One begins.

“A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted…while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.”-John Updike, intro to BASS 1984 (via) NYT […]

Early riser, it is your sermon I hear, the thud of feet on pine,
the birdsong bargaining in a darkness not prepared to leave.
Earth-tender, breathing slowly over the land’s sorrow,
And still I find ways to forget the bullet scar in the bathroom wall,
my mother’s backbone ruined, that fractured hour,
the mirroring of a girl’s cold hand,
And once, […]

“And then I was sick. I ran to the bathroom as fast as I could, a dirty little bathroom in a dirty little bar, and I threw everything up - and is it strange if I say it felt wonderful? I threw up until I felt empty inside. I stood up from the toilet, […]

Friends who know me well know that I abhor giving gifts. Outdated gadgets, returnable sweaters, and awful perfumes are not my bag. Instead, I offer up tins of toffee nut, magic bars, cookies of unfathomable proportions (friends have lamented over their weight gain due to my stand mixer), and books. I not only try […]

You say to yourself that you would never fall victim to a cult. You would never be led astray by the promises of a charismatic shaman. Because you’re smarter than that, your will is impenetrable. We practice psychological distancing; we convince ourselves that people who fall prey to a cult’s message are “crazed lunatics,” […]

For a long time, I had an idea of a novel. I clung to the idea and imagined characters speaking in my head - this elaborate flight of fancy. The book would be big, I told everyone. BIG!!! A satire of our technologically-dependent age. But the plot never realized and the characters were simply […]

Then Albert said, “Tell me about your life.” And I was grateful to him, for that was exactly what I wanted to talk about, my life. I told him about my almost-marriage, my friendships that lacked excitement, my girlfriends who lacked one thing or another, my good job that somehow wasn’t exactly what I […]

It’s rare that you’ll hear me pushing a poetry collection, because sadly, I tend to not read much poetry. However, I’ve been a long-time fan of Idra’s work, having published her in my now-defunct literary journal, Small Spiral Notebook, and subsequently nominating her for a Pushcart Prize. In The Next Country, Novey’s lyrical exploration […]