Activity

Even though her family was black and mine white, I hewed more to her worldview than to the four-in-hand tie knotters riding the club car or going to the Yale game in Cheever’s and Salinger’s and Fitzgerald’s books.

His sole question—“Were you penetrated?”—felt coldly prurient.

Maybe any writer who yaps about her work outside brief interviews comes off as a car salesman. Or worse, as if she’s touting herself as the doyenne.

Some memories—often the best and worst—burn inside us for lifetimes, florid, unforgettable, demanding to be set down.

the kind of grotesque portraits Nabokov can paint of family underlings like his neurasthenic governess Mademoiselle