The summer of 1989, shortly after my second husband and I married, we buckled my two daughters, who were seven and three, into the rear seat of a used car purchased for cash. We told no one where we were going. We meant to disappear.
I can remember the way he ripped the pages out of my notebook, wadded them into a dense ball, and said, in a voice free of emotion, “False Image,” as if that was all they were.
For the first time in our lives our mother’s house on Hillendale Drive is dirty. She’s been on a walker for years and can’t bend at the hip but still won’t allow my sisters and me to bring someone in. We do it anyway.
Singing these hymns had always been construed as a form of worship, but as my allegiance to the orthodoxy of the church slowly faded, my attraction to a cappella vocal music gradually expanded.
Everywhere in the bleached walls of the laboratory—the sterile linoleum flooring, the burnished metal of dissection tables, the zippered white bags used to veil the dead, the gleaming instruments used to cut them open—I saw the landscape of...
Father Johan climbed up first, and I hoisted his rifle and backpack up to him. The tower, a box on stilts, was walled with rugs and blankets strewn about, but the cold cut everything, including my oversized boots and borrowed wool socks. It...
Yet even when my disorder was at its worst, there were pleasures I can still recall. I considered it “okay” to eat when I was genuinely hungry. I don’t know if this was permission I’d received from Fat Is a Feminist Issue, a book I turned...
