I’m a coward. Let’s get that on the table first thing. I am not one of those heroines who stands up to a person in a rage and tells them off in some narratively satisfying way. My own personality, and early training, work against it. When I’m dealing with a volcanically angry person? I shut down. I get quiet and sort of “gone-to-my-own-private-island” absent until it’s over. It’s different if I see someone being bullied or harassed–but even then, my tendency is not to confront the bully but to take… Read more Writing Angry →
Come all you weary factory girls I’ll have you understand I’m going to leave the factory And return to my native land. … The Overseers need not… Read more The Factory Girl’s Song →
On Saturday night, spur of the moment, my husband, my daughter, and I went to see Sorry to Bother You, which starts out looking like an urban maybe-failure-to-launch comedy and… Read more Scary Abundance, and its Pursuit →
WARNING: do not read if details about tooth problems give you collywobbles. When I turned 21, my father took me out to dinner and gave me a piece of Fatherly Advice: take care of your teeth. This was more heartfelt even than it might have been, since Dad had, for about 20 years, neglected his teeth, and the bill, in every imaginable sense, had recently come due. I inherited many sterling qualities from my parents. I don’t know which one gifted me with my teeth (I suspect my father, but… Read more Teeth →
I run a small museum. It’s a museum on the history of the book, and of bookbinding, and one of the things we talk about when talking about the book… Read more A Set of Dickens on the Whatnot →
My father made it to almost-98, sharp as a tack the whole time (as near as I can tell, all his very long-lived siblings did except for the youngest one, who had some sort of dementia in the last few years of her life). My mother died relatively young, but was reasonably sharp. However, my father’s mother (seen left) also had dementia for as long as I knew her (I was 14 when she died, and felt deeply swindled by fate, listening to all the stories about a Grannie Annie… Read more Creak, Memory →
I was thirteen when we moved from New York City to Sheffield, Massachusetts. There were many striking differences, but one of the big ones? Transportation. Unbeknownst to my mother, I had been secretly taking the subway to school in the mornings (this meant an additional 15 minutes of sleep, for the bargain price of ten cents a day…yeah, it was a while ago). In the mornings I would run to the IRT station and jam myself and my armload of textbooks in among a zillion of my fellow citizens (this… Read more I Was Raised in a Barn: Cars →
I had a co-worker some time ago, relatively young and new to the workforce, who, over the time we worked in the same company, got the No habit bad. There… Read more The Habit of No →
