The Train
My beeper went off at 4:00 am. It vibrated across the night stand until I reached over and grabbed it. The message read, “Sally Card-pregnant-bleeding-passed out-407-648-5101” Sally was the lab tech in my Ob-Gyn office. She had no high risk factors. Her sonogram did not show placenta previa, a condition that causes bleeding. Placental abruption,...
The Gatekeeper
The Mountain Climber didn’t like to talk about the accident, but because she alone had witnessed the Skier fall off the top of the world, the press had no one else to turn to. What could she say? Without a word of warning, the Skier had plunged past her through the thin, alpine air and...
Review of Andre Dubus’s Townie
W.W. Norton & Company 2011 I haven’t spoken to my dad in more than twenty years. Of course he hasn’t contacted me either, but I suspect that this may be my life’s regret. My parents divorced when I was two, and Mom was awarded sole custody. But when my brother was eleven and I was...
Review of Tom Montgomery Fate’s Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild
Beacon Press 2011 As I write this review I’m wearing a T-shirt I bought when I visited Walden Pond. It sports a woodcut image of Henry David Thoreau with one word beneath: Simplify. The irony of an entire tourist trade built up around an iconoclast who did indeed wish to simplify wasn’t lost on me...
Review of Mira Bartók’s The Memory Palace
Free Press 2011 Memory fascinates me…as does madness, so Mira Bartók’s memoir The Memory Palace drew me in. As powerful a draw these subjects may be, I won’t linger long without words, long delicious strings of words, and here Bartók delivers. As I read, I could feel the careful attention she gave to each sentence,...
Review of Sharyn Wolf’s Love Shrinks: A Memoir of a Marriage Counselor’s Divorce
Soho Press 2011 I spent years debating whether I wanted a divorce. My three children would live in a broken home, where the fairytale of one happy family, with mom and dad together would be lost. I’d be a single mom, who’d forfeit the comfort of depending on another person. But my husband and I...
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