The week that began with Melania Trump’s memorable observation that a country should be judged by how it treats its citizens also began with an email from my mother’s sister, announcing that she and her husband were in Paris and would love to see me if I had time.

I had experienced blackouts ever since I first started drinking. That was the summer I finished tenth grade, at the Norway Cup, when I just laughed and laughed, a momentous experience; being drunk took me to places where 

Xavier tells me he is upstairs doing his homework but I know that he is watching our new neighbor. Grace Poole lives in the townhouse just across a narrow alley from our own. I was taking

My landlady died in the fire that consumed her house, but the rescue squad was able to pull her unconscious dog, Shiloh, out of the flames and breathe life back into him. 

The African (a Zairian man) spoke, sang, recited, wept, laughed, talked with amazing rapidity. He was performing for a large audience, but specially in honor of me and a few other visitors to Zaire, a work he had created about the politics, excitements, anguishes and ironies of World War II and the years just after. He took all the roles himself.

I was staying at Jean’s apartment in LA for two months to escape an especially dire Oregon winter and to test how much weight our relationship could bear. We had been conducting a long-distance romance for nearly a year then, back-and-forth visits and weekend excursions, spending all our money on the effort. All-the-time texting, everyday emailing. If we performed all the steps in our elaborate ritual, in exactly the right order, it was possible to conjure the other; to feel, rather than eight hundred miles apart, as though we were separated by a wall, a closed door. Jean happened to be better suited to this than I was. She possessed first-rate powers of object permanence; she was uncommonly kind and endlessly receptive to inspirations of beauty too minute and too remote for me to access. She worked in those days as a freelance copywriter and social media strategist for hip start-ups. Even these tasks she approached with unlimited, inexplicable enthusiasm.

Fiamma fainted in chapel this morning. The teachers do not know we make ourselves do it, though they suspect we do. They even had a doctor brought in to examine us, but he said there was nothing wrong with us. He said he had never seen such a healthy group of growing girls. We do look healthy.

She surveys the room where she has slept all the eighteen years of her life: the old brass bed, the pink armchair in the corner where she has read so many books, the Queen Anne tallboy where she

He remembers the peculiar, special warmth of days in southern France. The sharp smell in the air of sun on pine trees. Of fires. These smells and that warmth on his skin come to him before he sees anything.

I am tortured by a strange nostalgia, there are images in my mind from the first World War, of English soldiers, little fellows under their saucer helmets marching down village streets, with French children