We’ll go back to work just after Miss Catharine puts the cornflowers in her hair. This is one of our favorite moments in the movie, when the octogenarian gentlewoman Miss C is given piles of cornflowers by George and his kind-eyed father, who says, “There are no jewels more becoming a lady. I like to see them in your hair.” And so father and son de

J in her sobbing, her tearfulness, her out-of-controlness, felt unknown, perhaps most of all to herself. Who was this weeping woman? she wondered. Where did she come from? When I said “I know,” I was really saying: “I know you.” In other words: “You are still J. I recognize you. You’re still the person you were before all this fucking crying starte

My world had become very small, in the way of addicts. This island: I had chosen smallness, safety. What’s safer than an island? During this period, the children sometimes discussed the coming zombie apocalypse, and they and their friends agreed it was good that we lived on an island. An island is safe and contained and one’s choices are necessaril

I walked home through the bright, light gray snow to Fred, and we did the things real married people do: made coffee, nagged each other about our messy living quarters, told jokes to compensate for the terrible world.

You spend too much time out here; it’s one of your escape hatches. Without admitting it, you’ve been building a little collection of these over the last few months—ever since around the time you turned forty-four. Maybe they’re starting to get out of hand. You’ve always been close with your best friend, Victoria, but suddenly you’re on the phone ev

I look at her and I think . . . it might have worked. She might be both, safe and free, in a way I never was. My daughter is a poised cat with a beautiful, rare giggle and a complex and very well protected interior life. Not protected in a rigid, rampart-y way but protected the way a nature preserve is protected. That’s what her introversion is lik

Letters are easy to come by. There are boxes full of them. They overflow plastic bags, they fall out of books like flat fledging birds. Letters were the way you and your friends found one another when you were young; you stuffed your little all into an envelope and dropped it in the box and waited. Friendships were kept alive for years in this mann

Secret 5 I ran into an old friend at a backyard BBQ. He matter-of-factly informed me he was having a midlife crisis and the thought of an affair had crossed his mind. But he was pretty busy. Also, he said, waving his hand comically up and down in front of his aging body, as if to display it, “Who’d have us?”

We had been together for fifteen years, but since we’d both always worked at home—since in fact we were always together—we joked we’d been married a hundred and seventy-six years in normal-people time. Except as Morrissey says, that joke wasn’t funny anymore. To me. I didn’t ask how it felt to him. I didn’t see that this was a problem—this incurios