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[...] her greatest virtues as a writer of fiction are old-fashioned: exquisitely constructed sentences, a capacious moral imagination and a depth of feeling for human frailty, a near-hallucinatory precision in describing physical phenomena as well as emotional states, interpersonal dynamics, and sh…

Via social media, she knew words and phrases like gaslighting, trauma-informed, disorganized attachment, kink-friendly, pinkwashing, and could use them all in a sentence.

She was drawing near to the end of her life, and couldn’t imagine living more than another ten years. In that time, sick as …

Well, when I was twenty-five I’d decided to write a novel in the first person, in which I would affect the air of an autistic snob and fool myself and the reader into thinking that I came from a good family and had suffered only from affluent neglect. Maybe it was supposed to be an affectionate car…

I reflected on the fact that Tiffany lamps would never again be appealing; they had ruined themselves for all time, these aberrant lamps, like Belle Epoque paintings and tapered Coca-Cola bottles and ballet dancers by Degas and handblown Murano glass figurines and those Toulouse-Lautrec absinthe bo…

My mother had not been invited to the memorial service, which concluded with a family dinner at Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. We sat in a private back room, in neckties and in silence, the latter awkward but expressly desired by my stepmother, and disturbed only by the bevy of liveried waiters who annou…