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Browse Topics
Siblings
Readers Write
On The Edge
Running away from your life, hiding from a would-be rapist, watching the neighborly veneer crack after two hurricanes
May 2005
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Boy Named Candy
Growing up, my siblings and I were aware of the enormous volume of water contained there. We knew that if the dam broke, our house would be swept away. It was tangible evidence of something we already felt: that we were never really safe.
April 2005
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Prayer Wheel
A few days after our mother entered the hospital, my brother and I left for summer camp. Our mother, who could still sit up in bed, wanted us to go, and our father did too. We’d been looking forward all summer to sleeping in tents under the stars, rappelling down the sides of cliffs, and hiking along streams.
February 2005
Readers Write
Hero Worship
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, family members, Wonder Woman
January 2005
Fiction
My Sister, The Writer
My sister is a writer. She writes terrible things about me. She thinks she is telling the family secrets, but we all think she’s hysterical.
January 2005
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
My Lunatic Brother
I’m sitting in my parents’ living room, listening to my older brother, Ben, tell the family how he’s recently discovered that his phone is being tapped. His tone is casual, even upbeat, as if he were discussing a stretch of unusually good weather.
December 2004
Fiction
Dear Me
If you are reading this letter, then I have some bad news for you. You’ve always been a straight shooter, so here it is: You have Alzheimer’s.
December 2004
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
This One’s For Me
All this makes me sound selfish. I have had to make room for this selfishness inside me, to accept the fact that alongside the Sue who cares deeply, grieves excessively, and fights fiercely for her siblings is the Sue who seethes beneath her horsehair shirt. People like Mother Teresa must practice selflessness until there is no self left to practice on.
November 2004
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Beauty Of Second Avenue
The foyer was home to my mother’s books but a place of exile for my brother and me. Around the time I was eleven and he seven, my mother began banishing us, singly, to the foyer without dinner in fits of unpredictable, unfathomable rage.
October 2004
Fiction
The Rat
“Rat check,” my father would say when he came home from work. And we would run to the various traps to see if we’d caught the rat. We slept lightly, each hoping and fearing that we would hear the slam of the trap in the night and be the one to go running with the news that the rat at last was dead. But we found nothing, heard nothing.
September 2004
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