If you asked my college roommate to rate my neatness on a scale of 1 to 10, she’d probably say 12. I was Felix Unger to her Oscar Madison, and as much as she drove me crazy with her messiness, I’m sure my extreme tidiness drove her even crazier. So she would’ve been shocked if she’d seen the state of…
One icy Saturday in January 1980, my father and I were loading firewood into the back of the family station wagon when his face, red from the cold wind and exertion, suddenly drained of color and turned as gray as the crusted snow under our boots. He slumped onto the car’s tailgate and pulled from his pocket the battered aluminum…
The day my father died, suddenly, of a heart attack, I wanted to be the one to tell my son, who was six years old at the time, what happened. I sat down on the sofa, took Truman’s hands in mine, and told him his grandfather had died. I explained what that meant—that we wouldn’t see him anymore but would…
When I was a teen growing up outside New York City, my mom was a big country and western fan. I remember the collective groans from my brother, Bret, and me as she ferried us and our friends to after-school activities to the honky-tonk sounds of what I heard as hillbilly twang. One of my mom’s favorite songs was about…
Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories got a lot of attention when it was published by Scribner. It has already received accolades from The New York Times, The New Republic, and other major publications, and it deserves all the buzz, shares, and likes it will get. This posthumous collection of essays and short stories is beautiful and brilliant, young…
Second Acts is a series of interviews with interesting people who discovered new pathways midway through their lives. Mirabai Starr is professor of comparative religions at the University of New Mexico, Taos. She translated Dark Night of the Soul and The Interior Castle, and then a cascade of other works based upon the teachings of spiritual mystics. Her first book in her…
