Nonfiction

Phone. 4:45 a.m. Still dark out. Nobody calls with good news at this hour. Maybe somebody back east… Maybe something really great happened, so they know it’s okay to wake me up… Hope nobody died…

What I remember most about that hot and humid summer was the way fear took hold like a rip current.

When you write about murder it’s best to start with a few facts. The first one is this:

I went to lunch with a man I was getting to know who suffered from depression but was disciplined and productive.

After twenty years, what remains of my father? I have a wooden platter on the wall

Billy Baker lived down the street from me, near the dead end. I was ten and he was eight, but he had a way about him that made him seem older.

People told me my mother was beautiful. By the time I was able to perceive her face, I only saw the mouth turned sharply down at the edges and a glimpse of wildness in her eyes…

The day I decided to again steal food I instituted three simple rules: Steal only essentials, only from big chains, never brag.

I know that there is a wholeness to the landscape in which I live. I know this as common sense, as experience, and by documentation and report.

First, I remember his hand. Warm — like blood, like loss.

(Excerpt from Home Truths)   Dreams are a subset of lies, the way the unconscious mind works to make it possible for us to keep living with ourselves.

The beaming portrait of Kim Il Sung on the roof of the Pyongyang Airport was the first thing that greeted us when we emerged from our plane

I have a man-made breast. It was created fourteen years ago from a saline implant and a piece of my latissimus dorsi.

At a writers’ conference not long ago, I gave a public reading from “Trading Off,” a memoir that for the most part dramatizes a turbulent relationship I’d had with an old high school baseball coach. During the q and a, I was asked the usual questions: “Did it really happen the way you wrote it?”

The culture of exile is the culture of loss…