For the past few years J and I have lived next to a grocery store. It glows at night. If you listen you can hear the hum. 

I won’t apologize for trying to forget the days I spent with you, riding pillion on your Honda, inhaling Bombay’s foggy polluted streets, sitting on rickety wooden benches of hole-in-the-wall Indo-Chinese joints, slurping Szechwan noodles and sipping Tom Yum soup, strolling on Juhu’s wet sandy beaches, letting the ocean wash our feet.

start with the word catholic and an image surfaces—what first? Brother Aquinas adorned in black robes, his large gold cross (or was it silver) swinging from hip-to-hip, his cloaked arms holding tight the Bible to his chest, in reach of his heart.

A girl on my train is watching Kylie Jenner’s snapchat. I lean in and watch over her shoulder. I can't hear, but it doesn't really matter.

I found out I was pregnant in the bathroom of a wine bar. 

I try to turn everything into a metaphor so I don’t have to face it straight on.

Things to remember:

Ghost Deer, Ohio

Ray St. Ray

The walls, statues, and shrines of the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum are covered in offerings to the spirits—or loa—represented within. Plaques have pennies and dimes resting on their frames; there is a wishing stump filled with dollar bills. And there is lip-gloss everywhere.

After watching the TEDx Talk, I initially thought, “I wonder if everyone who watches that video will try to write a memoir.”

There’s an episode of The Outer Limits where Alyssa Milano plays a college student that eats men whole with her vagina.

[1] Titles of this essay’s previous drafts included “On Déjà Vu and Getting What You Asked For,” “He Said I Wasn’t Queer,” and “Still, Apparently.”

A fleet of pickup trucks and a white panel van have taken all the shady spots outside my parents’ house.

His first sensory seizures were like a passing light-headedness.

They stopped my mother’s heart four times.

I definitely gained traction in my twenty-ninth year. At twenty-nine, my skin cleared up, I sold a book. But the biggest accomplishment for me was that I stopped working retail and made my money solely from writing and teaching writing.

For ten years, General Motors knew about faulty ignition switches in its cars but concealed this information.

When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I could get back to stacks of paper grading, so I could be as productive

I was wearing my home-made Giants uniform, as I did every day that week, laboriously sewed by mom who was not enamored of sewing. 

If you didn’t learn how to have sex with Prince playing, you might still not know how. Everything about Prince was, “Wait, you can do that?!” It’s not that he was (just) a genius musician, it’s

It is 5:30 in the morning. I am standing in the lobby of a midtown Manhattan hotel, judging the distance between me and a planter because I am pretty sure I am going to throw up.  My stomach is in

I have been to many games at Shea Stadium and I know that this facility’s bar for unacceptable behavior is extremely low.

Let’s start this account of fuckfaces on October 18, 2006. I was 30 years old, recently engaged, in my third year of residency training at Chapel Hill, and depressed about the New York Mets. 

Dear Dicky,
You probably figured it out by now, but I’m sorry I stole the softball.

Weezer (The White Album)
Weezer
Release Date: April 1, 2016
Atlantic Records
Length: 34:05

The academic excuse for why I was in LA last week is the Association of Writing & Writing

FUCKING HELP ME

I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw Stand By Me. I guess that would have made it 1990. As the narrator, Gordie Lachance, says about the first time he saw a dead human being, as voiceover at the beginning of the movie: “a long time ago… but only if you measure terms in years...