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everyone believed the internet was a country where murderers lived.
AS I WALK BEHIND HER down the halls, it happens. I shrink inch by inch until I am no longer an adult, but a baby toddling along in a comically oversized business suit. I have been pretending to be a grown-up this whole time. My briefcase is full of milk; I have been found out.
There is always someone in a writer’s family who is funnier and more original than she is—someone
Every time I try to capture her and force her into my private zoo of description, I fail.
Often these jokes involve sporting events that are being broadcast that day, and then all the men groan, because they love sports very much and would rather be watching them, but just kidding, because Jesus is a football that all of us can carry down the field for the win.
Renata Adler wrote: “‘He has suffered enough’ meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too.”
“I did, I talked to the policeman who was at the scene. He told me that if anyone else had hit that man, he would be dead.” She lowers her eyelids modestly. “So actually, in a way, I saved his life.”
Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried.
sometimes wish my childhood had been less obsessed with the question of why we are here. But that must be the question of any childhood. To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother’s body and finally your own. From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the
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