Old Babes in the Wood

She’s a strategic liar, being a memoirist. She likes to roll the dice, try things out on people, see how far she can go.

Satire in extreme times is risky. Choose any excess, think you’re wildly exaggerating, and it’s most likely to have been true. (Sympathetic murmur) I know.

They’ve had a sauna in the little shack Tig designed and built for the purpose, back when he was first feeling arthritic, back when he thought such a thing as a sauna might reverse time. No such luck, but anyway here they are. They’re holding hands. They’re wearing white terry-cloth bathrobes like those in spas, bought by Nell when white terry-clot

So, I was dragged along the street, a cobblestone street, by the way: very bumpy. All those doing the dragging were men, though there were some female bystanders, gazing at me in wonderment—wasn’t I supposed to be the revered, trusted confidante of the rulers in this civilized, prosperous, vibrant, and tolerant queen city of the venerable Roman Emp

But how could Lynne be mad enough for that? Mad enough to never speak to Csilla again? She’s too old for terminal scenes and door-slamming, she can’t work up the self-righteous indignation. You’re dead to me is what the younger generation might say. But Csilla is far from dead to her. Csilla is in fact part of her. The huge plastic watch, the white

Single strand of pearls, wild, not cultured. (Worth it, she said. Only the wild ones had souls.)

The tidying up. There’s a lot of that. So much accumulates, year after year. Then there’s a mini-explosion, and all the items that have been gathered together—the letters, the books, the passports, the photos, the favourite things kept in drawers and boxes or on shelves—all of this is strewn in the wake of the departing rocket or comet or wave of e

The late 1960s was a time of big domestic breakups: the so-called sexual revolution, post-pill, pre-AIDS. Young bearded hippies everywhere, girls in maxicoats, then long flower-child skirts and granny boots, acid and weed freely available, plus—later—other substances. It was as if the 1950s ideal family had swelled up like a water balloon and then

I still believed that my mother had some influence over the Universe. I’d been brought up to believe it, and it’s hard to shake such ingrained mental patterns. “You’re so mean!” I said. I was, however, eating the cookie: oatmeal raisin, baked yesterday, one of her staples. “The opposite of ‘mean’ is ‘doormat,’” she said.