family

For a short period of time in my teenage years, my mind blocked out memories made within a nine-to-12-month period. I was unable to recall a hospitalization, a car crash, or what author John Green calls “the night feeling” in his collection The Anthropocene Reviewed — an overwhelming sense of dread that flooded my mind and body until I awoke the next morning.

Home Bodies At the traffic light next to the pink brick wall, my kids stir from sleep. It’s been a long trip for their four-...

A Prayer for Sweet Dreams All of us gather around the coffee table where our glasses of beer sweat moons onto stolen coasters. In this room we...

This memoir is as much about you dealing with a late-term medical abortion as it is about navigating the grief, loss, and processing of your family members.

On Watching My Nephew Trying to Save a Downed Sparrow Perched at the kitchen island, I did not hear the soft thud. I did not hear the...

Throughout Bloodstream, you explore grief and nostalgia for humans (those unborn and those present) and pet dogs alike. You write want. Want to have a few more moments with those passing. Want to have experienced motherhood. Want to make it through these wantings unscathed.

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). 

Abecedarian: Whatever Grows Aunt B. lives, after her death, in our wedding photos:bespectacled, cigarette hanging from her lips, beercup in one hand, phone in the...

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...

B is for Bird My parents must have knownthree hatchlings in the nestblown from our maple treewouldn’t survive. But they gave us an eye dropper and...