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I want to be a woman who is much more than she seems. If my body were to contort and transform the way Sam’s does throughout the novel, I would like that fish — because, let’s face it, I’d be a slimy water-dwelling creature with the absurd number of hours I spend searching for the nearest body of water to swim in — to grow sharp anglerfish teeth to feed and protect itself.

I wonder if this conjuring of my grandmother is what you experience throughout Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter’s Memoir — if we create the image and persona of those who are not present because our establishing of their voices allows us to analyze a part of us we are otherwise unwilling to confront (i.e., an unwillingness to move on and heal). 

Dear Andrea Leeb, “There’s a part of me that wonders if I’ve made it all up,” I said to my therapist this past winter. In...

Dear Melissa Fraterrigo, I am a chronic — albeit, attempting to recover — people pleaser. From the ages of 18 to 21, I found myself becoming...

Dear Jill Christman, Nestled into the space between mountains and fields in England’s Lake District, a group of undergraduate English students from central Ohio and...

Dear Grace Talusan, When reading your memoir The Body Papers, I’m struck, as I’m sure all your readers are, by the contrast between experiencing prejudice...

Dear Jesse Lee Kercheval, When I was mere three feet tall and unaware of the world, my parents bought our family the Nintendo Wii. As...

Dear J.R. Moehringer, As a teenager, I was terrified of drinking alcohol. My parents told me stories of peerswho failed school, cars that crashed, and...

Dear Michael Kleber-Diggs, I’m not good at growing things. My Venus flytrap died in less than a month. I set down my potted Spider Plant...

Dear Jill Christman,  I’m running again. Small distances before the dark horizon, steady breathing below gray skies. I still have tendonitis, inflammation of the tendons...