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I have a strange affliction when it comes to talking to my daughter about sex. Yes — she is only two and half, so our current sex talk is limited…

“Ma? Do you know where the old Halloween stuff is?” I have arrived early at my childhood home in Martinez to take Ma to her Alzheimer’s checkup. I’ve just thought…

Heidi Raykeill: I loved your new book, Mommy’s Little Girl: On Sex, Motherhood, Porn, and Cherry Pie. It’s about time someone strung those words together! And just in time for…

That’s all I see of her now. The wide open hole that never closes. A tunnel of darkness too dry to enter. No one wants to anymore, anyway. Except me.…

Master Breen poses in the top row, his hands folded across his chest like Cuchulain, the tips of his handle-bar mustache brush his checked cravat. My mother — just a…

It is said that to dance on a graveIs disrespectful of the dead. But now, in the sunlight of late May,The children dance on their great-grandmother’s grave. My mother would…

My mother dressed me in red. A good red winter coat. Red socks to cheer up the plaids. Red barrettes in my brown hair. Later, a good black wool skirt,…

“Howard Hughes is dead, Ma,” I tell her for the third time today. “I know you’re mad he sold the airline, but he got his just desserts — he died.”…

It wasn’t that I minded bringing other kids home from school. It was who might be in the kitchen, really. It might be Mom, or somebody who looked like Mom…

Eighteen years old. How I yearn to see the world, to hop in a van and fly down the highway. Like my mother did when she was my age. Times…

My city is like a saltwater pearl, gently, gently cradled by the Wasatch mountains. The crescent of the foothills tenderly curve around the city like the palm of a mother’s…