Activity

Here is the puzzle: Have you ever accused yourself of one of the lesser moral flaws or questionable values which, if you were a character in a novel or a movie, would put you on the side of the people you don’t like? I confess to a soft spot for the humorless, heartless wife in Woody Allen’s Interi…

In my own life in Washington, too, things felt murky. From the start of my relationship with Jack a decade earlier, I’d had certain wishes: for plenty of breathing room, a reliable measure of playfulness, a loose-reined sense of security. Though I’d figured marriage would fulfill these desires, it …

In my late thirties, when for a short period I lived in Moscow, I sometimes wondered if there were too many words in the English language. Longing and desire, for instance: was it really necessary to have both? Couldn’t a single, flexible word suffice? Maybe want would work. Not need; that was diff…

I’ve kept one for decades—it’s the font of all my writing. I recently taught a class on the diary at Barnard, where we read real ones by Pavese, Woolf, Sontag, André Gide, and Carolina Maria de Jesus, as well as work by Joyce, Ernaux, and others. These days people are more excited about digressive,…

Finally, the day he had been so desperately waiting for arrived: October 25, 1995, a Wednesday. At precisely five o’clock, he walked into the Ecole’s packed lecture hall, where thousands of students were talking noisily in all kinds of languages—as though the children of the builders of the Tower o…