November 2010

One evening several weeks later, when I am seventeen and at the bar in a ski lodge high in the mountains, a man old enough to be my father makes lewd, suggestive comments to me about my looks and his desire to have sex with me. I cut him to ribbons by attacking his masculinity [...]

My first boyfriend, Will, was tall, strong and certain of himself. He was funny and moody and kind and sensitive and his certainty of himself allowed me to be certain of myself. I loved him and he loved me. His family was kind to me and invited me to stay with them at their beautiful [...]

When I was 13 and my sister was 16, we teamed together to try and force my mother to see someone about her diabetes and her unhappiness. We knew my mother was impressed by Ainslie Meares, an Australian psychiatrist well-known then for his down-to-earth approach to illness and his ideas about health and nutrition. My [...]

For all the sad craziness going on in our family, we somehow managed to live and laugh and look for fun and light-hearted events to balance and hide everything else. My mother honed her sense of the absurd and, when she burst into laughter about something silly and spontaneous, we would all dissolve into laughter [...]