Perhaps blame is the way the universe organizes itself around tragedy and loss. Without blame, suffering is random, and that kind of randomness leads to madness

It is upon the rubble of ancient history that today stands

knew it wasn't the right kind of love, because it required nothing of me. I did not need to worry about keeping it alive or putting it out since it was kept alive quite independently of anything I...

Children will end up a world away, whether you want them to or not-unaware of the havoc being wreaked upon their histories back home.

It was pleasure derived not from parental pride, but from gratitude. We had been blessed by the existence on this earth of our three particular children, and we had been assigned a blessed task in...

{we} made love, though it was a stretch to call it that. I was making love, I think; he was taking what I made.

The photo is there in the hatbox, evidence that all the people I love best in the world were once in the same house, at the same time, healthy and whole, celebrating the season together.

Where were all the people I loved? I could feel them, flung about, the distance between us a crushing weight that I myself had put there.

walking into oblivion to claim love.

There's the past again, keeping its foothold, wreaking its havoc.

Your father flung his windbreaker over his shoulder and the zipper stung my cheek, the beginnings of retribution, perhaps, for a past that had long ago laid down the invisible blueprint of our future.

Want like a small dirty creature, waiting all the years of her marriage for a sign. Patrick was not the sign; she herself was, her own blue dress, her tiny waist, her small, round breasts. And her...

I would need to be not so much myself as the person I felt inside me who had so far not been unleashed. He

first sight of him at the bar, the shock of him under my ribs.

It was so undignified and unnecessary, the way married people behaved. The indiscriminate airing of grievances, the incessant flinging of blame and complaint. Of course, I had no idea back then what a...

I carried on drinking excessively as long as I could-right up to the moment I decided to become a mother. It was not so difficult, then, to stop. The stakes changed, and you grew inside me, and the...

Some new power had risen in me. All my tight cavities were opening and warning voices were fading. I had only myself to worry about, and if I wanted, I could simply choose not to worry at all.

It's true-I don't really believe in mistakes. There's only what you do, and what you don't do, isn't there? It was a mistake to the extent anything like that is a mistake. The before and after of it...