Essays

The books, as my daughter said, were her childhood. How could I possibly give them away, deny her that safe corner of imagination?

I understood her loyalty to the one true story, the first version in her experience. That comforting feeling of stability and rightness is not easily outgrown.

I jog and write. Feet find road, fingers ping keys. I don’t lose weight. Essays are left in pieces. Chapters are only ideas. I had hoped that by now my resolutions would be paying off.

I was perhaps the exact readership that Judy Blume had in mind when she wrote Are You There, God? I was a girl with very little information about sexuality.

I still don’t remember what it is. I know the feeling though. I feel its emptiness like black tar.

Seeing my dead daughter become a publicly recognized name was unexpected in my self-focused grief and my naïve eagerness to share what a writer and human being Victoria was, and I have mixed feelings about it.

I have learned to value those things—the jugs and the kettles, the infant sunscreen.

My anxiety is high as I wait for my school district to decide about fall. I wait even though I have already decided my kids will not go back in person.

It was the moment my daughter refused to collude, wanting instead to strike out on her own, no matter what the consequences.

For the first time in my life, I was not looking outside of myself for validation. I wasn’t troubled by anyone else’s opinion about who I was, or what I…

It took months of distance to give myself permission to shape the experience into words. To own the right to my story—the story of my ordinary heart, scarred from decades-old…