“Get ready for fun,” I inform my husband and our dog. “It’s the holy-daze!” I pronounce “holidays” with a long O and a silly Z, because I am desperately trying to be merry. Every December, we wish we had kids, grandkids—even a nearby sibling or two would do. In their absence, I […]
A cartoon in the San Diego Union-Tribune shows a father walking his little girl past a man and woman seated on the grass by the side of the road. Their heads are bent over a baby cradled in the woman’s arms. “No, honey,” the father tells his little girl as they pass, […]
When we were young and cruel, our reflexes lightning fast, our vision 20/20, a friend of mine imitated an old person driving. He slid down on the leather seat, death-gripped the wheel, hunched toward the windshield, and slowed to eight miles an hour. Gasping in mock protest, I had to laugh. He […]
Bibliophobia was once thought to be a rare anxiety disorder, characterized by an intense fear of books. The etymology was simple: biblion, Greek for book, and phobia, Greek for fear. Diagnosis was equally straightforward: the mere thought of reading a book induced an irrational panic, and the stress response then triggered physical […]
A New Yorker writer with a penchant for pet monkeys and a past as an opium addict, hard-partying expat, foreign correspondent, mining engineer, and confidante of Madame Chiang Kai-shek grew up in St. Louis? So much for stereotypes. Emily “Mickey” Hahn’s father was a dry goods salesman. He had proposed to their […]
Through the front door’s smeary glass and between the leaps of our self-appointed guard dog, I could just make out the hope-brightened faces of two middle-aged men. Then I glanced down and saw a fat leatherbound book with gilt lettering tucked under one man’s arm. “Aw,” I thought, silently quoting a line […]
When I learned that Oxford Languages, famous for its erudite Oxford English Dictionary, dove into nineteen billion words, picked three contenders for Word of the Year, then turned the choice over to The People, my inner elitist cringed. Every time the city magazine I used to write for did a People’s Choice […]
How I have railed against virtual reality, that trench-coated assassin of the imagination. I was so sure VR would change us, make us more passive and less creative, leaving the door wide open for tyranny and idiocy and even worse, bland sameness. You know, the way Plato thought writing would implant forgetfulness […]
In “For My Lover Returning to His Wife,” Anne Sexton wrote of the Other Woman as being “all there…as real as a cast-iron pot.” Solid, enduring, generous, necessary. Anne, on the other hand, was a momentary luxury, an experiment. “I am a watercolor,” she ended. “I wash off.” Which, for me, was […]
Women are supposed to age as crones, faded stars, or good witches—but I would far rather be Miss Marple. What fun she must have been for Agatha Christie to invent, back in that first short story in 1927. By 1930, Jane Marple has a book all her own, The Murder at the […]
