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[...] My longed-for circle of family is choking me. The silk bow ties on my cheap business blouses--that middle-class disguise I'd wished for--are choking me. The good family name for my son is a strangle, since it forces me to drive with a restless kid hours in murderous traffic to dine with polit…

[...] And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller.

Frogs were keeping time in air drenched with honeysuckle.

Yet for every conceivable holiday--from Easter lamb to Christmas ham--our tin-car car crunches up the drive to the Whitbread estate, which lures me in some ways and yet always saps me dry. This isn't meant to sound peevish, for the Whitbreads are never not nice. But from the second I haul my bag up…

Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There's always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can't. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you're unhappy about the hatred that's been unleashed in your heart, you…