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The mysterious life of my mother’s half-sister

Although my mother was his only surviving child, her father always said he had another during his first marriage. He implied that the baby died as an infant, Mom says; in fact, I discovered this weekend, the little girl lived nearly six years. My grandfather, Robert Bruce, was seventeen when he wed Nettie Mason, then sixteen, in May, 1925. A . . .

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David Grann, P.I.

“The thing that Grann does so well is turn his investigators… into literary detectives.”

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Lit quips, observations, instructions & warnings #7

Fiction and the rest of life edition: “I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck . . .

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