When Cancer Chose Him
(This is the second of two short excerpts I’m including in this blog from my essay First to Go: A Nice Jewish Girl Survives the Love of Her Life, about my parent’s marriage. For the first excerpt, “A...
View ArticleOther Side of the Lake
The summer I was ten, my parents and I rented a big yellow farm house which was a stone’s throw from a clear, blue lake. Everyone with a weekend house in the vicinity used the lake; it was the main...
View ArticleThe Hunger Games, Corduroy and Me
Though I read The Hunger Games Trilogy, I have yet to see the movie—just because I haven’t found time. I’m thrilled that the reviews are so good, that all this anticipation won’t be for naught. I am...
View ArticleGoodbye Hadiya: An Ode to the Lights in our Lives
Your daughter dreams big. Why shouldn’t she? She looks at the future as a wide open sea of possibility, a canvas to be filled with color or left full of open spaces as she sees fit. She trusts that...
View ArticleValentine’s Eve Remembrance
My father died of cancer seventeen years ago today: February 13th, 1995, the day before Valentine’s Day. We sat shiva for just three days before we felt him urging us to get back out into the world...
View ArticlePrivilege, White and Otherwise: When your Dignity is Affirmed at the expense...
In Sunday’s Magazine section of the New York Times was an article about Alice Goffman, a young, white sociology professor. In the article, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Dr. Goffman shares a story about...
View ArticleOn A Motherless Mother’s Day, Remembering to Heal and to Laugh
You wanted to know how I am—meaning since my loss, since my mother died. I say, “doing okay,” because sometimes I am okay. Sometimes I forget, and life feels normal. I say, “You know, it comes in...
View ArticleApartment #17D – An Ode
This is the site of my childhood. Notches on a closet doorway mark my growth. Outside, on the balcony, a dark stain on one brick betrays the spot where Teenage Me hastily stubbed out a cigarette as I...
View ArticleIntegrating my Author and Therapist Selves
My father took my aspirations of being a novelist seriously from the start. His advice? “Get your first four chapters in, get your advance, and get to work.” Which was the way of the publishing world...
View ArticleA Book Designer’s Kid Shares her Book’s Cover
My debut novel, which will be released to the world in July of this year—seven months from now—has a cover. A real one. Which I happen to love and whose image I open onto my computer screen several...
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