Sublime

Grief, as I understood it—grief and I were acquainted—is the kind of loss that sets you on fire as you struggle to put it out.

Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

I brought her, cradled in my arms, the three waffle irons I’d uncovered on the kitchen counter. “Three,” I told her, as though they were a litter. “Yes,” said my mother. “Which one do you want to keep?” “All of them.” I don’t think my mother formally collected waffle irons (though later I would find an antique one beneath her bed), and at the momen

Her temperament was distinctly familial to me. She could be me, if I could unzip my skin and release all my fury. If Erin brought out the intellect in me (and my petty envy), Helen brought out what was raw in me.

I threw out corroded batteries, used and unused. I tossed plastic containers that had lost their lids and lids that had lost their plastic containers. I turned to the fridge. Once we had a glorious cat who could open a fridge door with a claw; one year he let himself in and shut the door behind him and ate half a cooked turkey breast and meowed to

Any writer will be asked, Why? Why write; why write this book; what made you do it. If I showed you a photograph of my parents, I think you’d understand.