The culture of my family was intense, two Harvard graduates with the ability to spin stories that made them a fascinating thing to behold. However, as their youngest child I often felt outside and alone in all this brilliant repartee and then there was the threat of the drinking, that the wine at dinner would produce a whiskey-soaked terrifying display by my father, his anger leveled mainly at my mother, but the rage infused the house with danger.
Read MoreStone Garden produced a hugely positive full-page NYT Sunday Review and my being chosen as a NYT Notable book. I received fan letters from people that told me they had never laughed or cried so much reading any other book and some that said it was the best thing they had ever read. Now, twenty years later I have written four rejected novels, rejected at times by my agent and others by publishers after an agent submitted the novels. Each has taken years to write.
Read MoreI had my first cold at sixty-five. Well, I still have it. I’m still coughing like Courtney Love after a night of cigarettes and heroin or one of those women who die of consumption in old movies. It’s the kind of cough that makes you check the tissue to be sure it isn’t spotted with blood. So far it has lasted a week, the cough, the congestion, the headache, the exhaustion. I find the whole thing annoying and unacceptable.
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