I grew up watching the news on television. Walter Cronkite explained that the footage from Vietnam told a story of chaos, cruelty, heroism, and loss. One of the English teachers from the school I would eventually attend held a weekly candlelight vigil in our town for her only child, a Yale student who was killed in Vietnam in 1967. When I asked my mother why she kept protesting the war that had stolen her son, my mother sighed and said, “What else can she do?”
Read MoreMy parents’ marriage was hard to categorize. They were madly in love, but they also were awful to one another, including my father being violent when drunk and my mother finding ways to punish him through guilt and shame. Still, they were married at twenty, met on the steps of the Widener Library at Harvard, brilliant, beautiful, and well, who knows, they were my parents; their marriage was a mystery except for one thing: I never wanted that.
Read MoreVisiting the cemetery in Princeton was a Gothic, rain-soaked quest. The cemetery guy was kind but busy and showed me on a map where my parents’ and sister’s headstones were. I had visited my sister’s grave as often as possible but moving far away had made it hard. At thirty-two she had died before I could tell her so many things.
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