“I tried to like it,” she wrote in a text message. “But I just can’t.” What? I thought. How can that be? That novel had ripped me to shreds. In a good way. It had been with perfect confidence that…
A few weeks ago, when I walked out of the theater after seeing Moonlight, I experienced a feeling akin to what I felt three days ago when I closed the cover of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and sat back and…
I confess. I don’t kill my darlings. I bury them alive. All those loved and discarded words. Full paragraphs and partial lines, whole pages and single, unwanted words. I gather them up, and I deposit them into a document that…
“First Sunday in Ordinary Time…” Saturday evening. Five-o’clock mass. I am eight. Squished into a pew between one of my brothers and my mother. Half-listening to the priest while I watch the last of the slush drop off the rubber…