We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing
Michelle Cacho-Negrete
Michelle Cacho-Negrete writes from her home in a red maple swamp in southern Maine. Her essay in this issue is part of a memoir she’s writing about her childhood in New York. Her work has appeared in a number of magazines, and she currently offers writing workshops in both Maine and Italy.
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Chanel Suit
It was during a search for jeans for my sons that I saw the gray suit hanging by itself like a fine work of art. A prominent sign identified it: COCO CHANEL SUIT. Even in the midst of the store’s usual castoff opulence, a Chanel suit was an unexpected find.
November 2013
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
What You Think About
You hang up the cellphone and think about how the surgeon cleared his throat again and again as he asked how you were, then said, “I have the best news of bad news,” and you think how you knew what he was going to say as soon as you heard his voice.
September 2009
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Stones
I strode impatiently over the drenched grass, rattling in my hand two rough stones that we’d brought from Maine, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of leaving stones on the grave to show that we had visited. They were striped rocks: white, gray, and black layers of prehistoric past.
April 2009
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Tell Me Something
Everything of my brother’s fits on a couple of shelves: boxes of records, books, a few photographs. When you’re killed at eighteen, you don’t leave much behind.
August 2008
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Season Of My Grandfather
My mother, my stepfather, my five-year-old brother, and I lived in a sunny three-room tenement in Brooklyn, New York. The walls of our foyer were lined floor to ceiling with my mother’s books, and I read as many as possible, entering a trancelike state in which everything else floated on the edges of my awareness.
April 2008
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
In My House
When I first heard that President George W. Bush would be making an Earth Day speech at Laudholm Farm, a sixteen-hundred-acre nature reserve near my home in Wells, Maine, it seemed as if a tainted bubble of exploitation had descended on the place, something especially unclean and dishonest.
January 2008
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
To Look For America
There it is: I’m American. I flush a deep, hot red. Shame rises up in me so strongly I can barely breathe. How did this happen? How did it become shameful to be an American?
March 2007
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Road To Linzhi
We’re marooned in a bowl of mountains on the road to Linzhi, Tibet. Unlike the mountains of home, which are settled, full-grown, and staid, the Himalayas are brazen, thrusting themselves into the sky. These mountains are an epic in the making. These mountains humble us: forty-four American and European scientists and their spouses, led by a Tibetan guide, Sangkar, who has lived here all his life.
December 2006
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Steeplechase
Evenings, the boardwalk was crowded with refugees from the hot city. Neon blazed, and loud music exploded from every arcade. The aroma of hot dogs, hamburgers, beer, and knishes mingled with the salt-scented breeze. It was the first time I’d known the expansive luxury of the open sky curving to the horizon.
December 2005
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
And Passion Most Of All
Her eyes were hard. I knew then that she was going to be relentless and wouldn’t give up until I acknowledged the truth.
April 2005
What Do You Think?
Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
SEND US A LETTER