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Since having people I loved in the house made it feel better, I decided I might try love again. I let myself fall for a funny, handsome man I’d had a crush on for many years, since the first moment I saw him, really, even though I knew he lived abroad. I went and found him in Paris and we climbed a…

In the year leading up to calling off my wedding, I often cried or yelled or reasoned or pleaded with my fiancé to tell me that he loved me. To be nice to me. To notice things about how I was living.

One particular time it was because I had put on a favorite red dress for a wedding. I exploded f…

(This is a family tradition that filters through the generations. We hate things, so we drink. We love things, so we drink. We have bad luck, so we drink. We fear good luck, so we drink. It has to do with a kind of sadness that is blood-born. My mother keeps a scrap of paper taped to her diary, a q…

“It’s a scrim,” I said.

“What do you mean, a scrim?”

“It’s like a scrim between me and anything I try to write. No matter what I’m working on. I’m not ever quite…touching it. There’s an obstacle.”

“A scrim.”

“Yes.”

She quoted from the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped: “I scrim, you…

During a conversation two years earlier, when I was already unhappy enough to consider leaving, I told Harriet I was worried about the harm I would cause if I left. She told me I was right to worry. I would cause harm. She also told me no one moves through this world without causing harm. I’d wante…