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
What do contemporary Americans regard as a satisfactory resolution for a young man’s spiritual quest? What do we want our heroes to learn and to become? That’s the question I began to ask over the past few weeks, as I (like a lot of other Americans) watched the second season of The Mandalorian. I … Read More
By one of those lovely coincidences that sometimes happen, I was reading Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance (about various kinds of fathers and what we inherit from them) when I got the call last week that my father’s clock was repaired and ready for pickup. My father was a railroad man—the kind who didn’t just work for … Read More
When I was growing up in the southern Midwest, our house had no air conditioning. Most people didn’t mind the heat too much—at least until that week in August when it would get oven hot. During that week, we often had two-shower days. Yesterday, when the temperature plummeted, the rain fell relentlessly, and the clouds … Read More
This crazy election week is a good time to be thinking about the Tao Te Ching. The Tao is a classic of early Chinese spirituality , an elusive, lyrical meditation on how to live in dark and dangerous times. Unlike Confucian thinking, which emphasizes social order (with its reliance on law, stability, and hierarchy), the … Read More
I can’t bear to think about the election. Also, I can’t bear not to. On average, I get twenty emails and two texts a day about it, asking for money or asking me to volunteer. (I have no idea how many phone calls I get a day because I just don’t answer.) I force myself … Read More
Years ago, my friend Susan took a class of college kids off to visit Middleton Plantation, outside Charleston. One of the few plantations not to be burned by Sherman’s troops, it was probably a terrible place for the slaves who worked the land, but now it’s lovely and quiet, a mansion of mellow brick set … Read More
It started as a prank. My husband loves them. The first Christmas I spent with him and his kids, he rented a Santa Claus outfit. Around 2 a.m., after we finished wrapping the presents and setting them under the tree, he stuffed the costume with newspaper and laid it on the sofa. He placed … Read More
Forest fires are still raging in the West. Covid is still gaining ground all over the world. And chaos at the top is still pushing the United States into disarray. Lots of us are casting anxious, hopeful glances toward the future, crossing our fingers for a recovery. Recent advances in medicine and the social sciences … Read More