Eighteen days after our dog died, my husband dreamt of her.

Ask me now about Grandma’s house and I’ll recall the ocean-carpet, candy, bossa nova, cousin, shotgun, books. I won’t mention the adult woman in a crib—a person who was someone’s daughter, sister—and I guess, aunt—for a lifetime.

Friday night, I swipe the side mirror off my Nissan Sentra and can no longer see what's behind me. No major loss. I've never been particularly interested in what's going on back there anyway. There's some evidence to suggest there's no such thing as the past or the future, only the present.

What is my obligation in this moment? Is it to my body or to my daughter’s?

A friend who is no longer arguing with her boyfriend later tells you The Magician’s wife called the police that night.

I couldn't fully recall the Simpsons episode in which Marge buys a near-identical pink Chanel dress.

I was a glamour upon a glamour upon a glamour, a mouth devouring a mouth devouring a mouth.

Imagine being so famous and blonde that people love you so much they hate you again.

When I first came out as gay at age 30, I went on dates with a variety of terrible women. One asked me out, selected the place, ordered the food and endlessbeers, and then sheepishly told me she

There was a summer when I was about eleven or twelve when my friend Jacob and I would wake up early—around five or six—and ride our bikes down to Kroger to buy small translucent tubs of chicken

I will feel like a bad country cover of a Kate Bush song.

> One of my favorite reading experiences was a book called "The Silent
> Woman" by the journalist Janet Malcolm; it was about the biographical
> treatments of Sylvia Plath and the impossibility of biography in general.

The first time I was called a chink was by another Asian.

The stench of my high school ID lanyard hung around my neck like a noose for the rest of the school year, reminding me of my capacity for self-destruction.

Who could trust those colors? Smears of scarlet molting into pert lavender.

Not long after the bugs started crawling out of my sink, the diamond on my engagement ring fell off.

If a middle-aged man sobs in a dark room and nobody is around to hear it, does anyone say, “It’s just a cat. Get over it?”

Ten years ago, I made a temporary move from New York to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a research fellowship for my novel. Within a month, I met Gino, a tall lawyer with a pronounced Roman nose,

My grandmother screamed when she saw me.

In the ninth grade, I learned that you say “hanged” and not “hung” when describing the way the boy down the street died by suicide.

As a baby dyke, I’d waded into sex and romance like a kid at a water park, slowly and then all at once. Now I was on the sidelines.

Half Brits, half Americans. Special Relationship Rule No. 1: Love thy neighbo(u)r.

Two months in, we began to confide our secrets to each other. Her early brush with benzos. My peer-pressure-prone passivity.

To our right, I feel the cool breath of a gaping canyon. It beckons, invisible behind the wall of fog, its voice the skid of tires on gravel.

A tiny Angus resides in the right speaker of our sound system, a miniature Malcolm in the left.