Educated

Dad was at his desk, holding a phone in his left hand. “We’ll talk about it now,” he said. “I told Shawn what you said. He is co ...

sung with my friends in the chamber choir. I must have fallen asleep, I thought. Too much wine. Too much Christmas turkey. Havin ...

Emily and Peter. A few feet from the trailer, near the door, the snow was stained with blood. Something had died there. From Mot ...

No, I tell myself. They were her words. But hers or not, those words, which had so comforted and healed me, were hollow. I don’t ...

35 West of the Sun I fled the mountain with my bags half packed and did not retrieve anything that was left behind. I went to Sa ...

again and again, each time repeating the same lines, that I should watch my back, that his assassin was coming for me. I called ...

I had a grant to study that summer in Paris. Drew came with me. Our flat was in the sixth arrondissement, near the Luxembourg Ga ...

wandered too far, changed too much, bore too little resemblance to the scabby-kneed girl they remembered as their sister. There ...

the core of my mind, which invented in the very moment of occurrence, then recorded the fiction. In the month that followed, I l ...

“Well, the last time I saw your brother,” he would say, emphasizing this last word as if he were spitting on it, “he had both ha ...

36 Four Long Arms, Whirling It was a sunny September afternoon when I heaved my suitcase through Harvard Yard. The colonial arch ...

Mother said they had already booked their flights and would be staying in my dorm room. “Do you want a hotel?” I asked. They did ...

taut and plastic; how his lips lacked natural roundness; how his cheeks sucked inward at an angle that was almost skeletal. His ...

My father and I looked at the temple. He saw God; I saw granite. We looked at each other. He saw a woman damned; I saw an unhing ...

I thought of my dorm room—of the murky walls and frigid tiles, but also of the sunflowers Drew had sent, and of the textile wall ...

what I had said, that had made me unwelcome in my own family. All I had to do was yield, and in five minutes it would be over. I ...

knock you down into the depths of humility. And when you are there, when you are lying broken, you will call on the Divine Fathe ...

37 Gambling for Redemption Someone was screaming, a long, steady holler, so loud it woke me up. It was dark. There were streetli ...

reflection, and my reflections were always of the expression on my father’s stretched face the moment before he’d fled from me. ...

My gaze dropped below the mountain and my breath caught. When Grandma had been alive, she had, by nagging, shouting and threats, ...