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There is some poet—it might have been Lowell—who said about his writing, “I want to break your heart.” There’s an arrogance in that that has always bothered me. You leave my heart alone! But I do have faith that, anytime I’m sharing a moment of true feeling, it will be recognizable to the reader. W…

People often ask me how I could have lived all those years as I did, so precariously. Meaning putting all my hopes in a literary career, never having a job to fall back on, and not having a family. If writing didn’t work out, what kind of life would I have? I sometimes think about how my father had…

As Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm and many others have suggested, what writers do when they write about other people is often unconscionable. People normally don’t want you to write about them, and if you decide you’re going to do it anyway, the important thing is not to lie about it, to yourself or…

I was absolutely serious about ballet but only for a short time when I was in high school. I fell in love with ballet when I saw still photographs of dancers in Look magazine, and I decided to take classes. I loved the purity of it, the simplicity: these are the steps, this is how you do them. And …

We ate in silence in the glass-walled café right on the ocean and I felt estranged from Ed, bored by him, moved by him. I thought understanding did not exist between Ed and me, but now I wonder what understanding means. By now I mean this minute. Did it mean safety, like an insurance policy that co…