We live in a golden age of memoir. While we often like our fiction, in this postmodern age, to explore the outer boundaries of the imagination (including alternative histories and magical-realist fables), we also crave the weight and heft of real life. Well-written memoirs fill that spot perfectly. So it’s no accident that two of … Read More
The documentary film Some Kind of Heaven paints a provocative portrait of post-retirement life in The Villages, an enormous complex in central Florida. My friend Maddy—author, journalist, professor emerita, and good buddy—saw it last February at an early screening, at the Miami Film Festival. When the film became widely available on streaming services last week, … Read More
A year or so ago, a friend pulled me aside and whispered urgently that everything was “going south.” She meant everything in her body, and I confessed that mine was doing the same. (Alas.) But I prefer to contemplate the prospect of literally going south, to Florida, Arizona, or Mexico. Or west, for some–to Hawaii. … Read More
Last year left us jittery and suspicious. So when my husband saw the New Year’s cards I’d bought—with Rilke’s “And now let us welcome the new year, full of thing that have never been” on the front—he pointed at the final words and said, “Really? ‘Things that have never been’? How about ‘things we had … Read More