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I’m aware that, in the telling, my love affair with Janna is hopelessly clichéd—its components so familiar from life, or Lifetime TV, that it could be written out mathematically. How to explain the enthrallment of living it? My family and work —so long the crux of everything I did—became thin topsoi…

Josephine’s apple pie arrived, and she heaped a bite with ice cream and ate vigorously. Her jaws flexed under her wide cheekbones. “You remember,” she began, speaking slowly, “how we used to imagine being rich? Do you remember that?”

Lucy nodded. She sensed from Josephine’s tone that this was a …

It is a hot, lazy day. They are becoming torpid from so many days of lying in the sun. They will be ready to go back to Chicago tomorrow.

“It reminds me of that place in France two years ago,” Lucy says. “What was that hotel?”

“Can’t remember,” Parker says. “Never can remember that stuff.”

…

Which is my battle cry by the time David of halfway-house fame shows up. He leaves Boston to rent a boxy monk's cell spitting distance from my house. Ponytailed David with his gangster Timberland boots and red bandana holding his head together. Not yet thirty, with the habit of referring to his les…

One of my art teachers in college sympathized with my inability to leave the studio until I made something good (with no criteria for what that would be). He said the problem was that I couldn’t get out of my own head enough to let things flow. He said I was too worried about what people would thin…