Tag: memoirs
Ghosts at the Liquor Store
There’s a ditch at the end of our driveway that consistently swallowed vehicles heading home after parties at our house. My siblings and I would help drunk adults push wobbly cars out of that ditch and back up onto the road. Seeing them off on their drunken way home. We never considered the hazards. Everyone we knew drank. Everyone drove, and the ditch, streetside, late at night, was an exciting place to be: dishevelled clothes, jealous brawls, dirty songs at
Making Love in the Land of Oil Rigs
In 2015, Tabitha Lasley, a former freelance magazine journalist, arrived in Aberdeen, Scotland, the United Kingdom’s oil capital, having spent four years on a novel about rig workers with nothing to show for it. (Her laptop was stolen from the apartment in London that she shared with her emotionally abusive boyfriend, whom she left when he did not sympathize with her loss.) “Sea State,” the result of her second try, was written out of the desire to “see what men
Searching for Coherence in Asian America
Near the beginning of his new book, “The Loneliest Americans,” the journalist Jay Caspian Kang imagines the memoir he could have written. It would begin with his parents arriving at the airport in Los Angeles, or unpacking boxes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Kang’s father completed his postdoctoral research in the eighties. If brevity were of no concern, he could start even earlier, with “General Douglas MacArthur’s liberation of Seoul,”and with “some line like ‘On the day my mother was born,
Can We Find a New Way to Tell the Story of Climate Change?
Early one morning in January, 2017, a group of environmental activists in their twenties piled into a rental van and drove from Midtown Manhattan to Albany. For weeks, they’d been planning a sit-in at the state capitol, to demand the passage of significant climate legislation. Inside, everything goes smoothly: the protesters walk past an unsuspecting security guard and, as practiced, link hands and sit down. Daniel Sherrell, one of the action’s organizers, describes the uncanny feeling of making himself heard
The Strange Revival of Mabel Dodge Luhan
“Now don’t you keep going on to me about introverts and extraverts and insides and outsides,” D. H. Lawrence wrote to Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1924. Instead, he continued, she should wash the dishes until she could keep up a rhythm “with a grace.” At the time, Luhan was reading up on mysticism and Jungian psychoanalysis, and she