Nelson Almeyda, one of my best friends, died today after living with cancer for more than a year. He was one of the most big-hearted people I’ve known, one of the funniest, sharpest, most expressive and most beloved, and also one of the most private. He was in fact so private about his troubles, so invested in being . . .
There’s something beautiful about grieving on the internet, all of us offering up our losses to each other, hoping to be touched and understood by each other when we’re at our lowest and most vulnerable, and there’s also something strange about expressing grief here. No matter how true and deep our sadness, when we offer it up online, it . . .
Writing so much about my early life recently has brought back a slew of memories, and with them some of the first poems I memorized at school. I taught this one, by Jessica Nelson North, to Autumn when she was a girl, and she loved it. Three Guests I had a little tea party This afternoon at three. ‘Twas very . . .
My mom was something like a mommy-blogger, in 1973. From the time I was two to two-and-a-half, she wrote these astoundingly detailed letters about our lives and me and Miami, typed them up in quintuplicate, and mailed them to the whole family. I have multiple copies of some of them. They’re an amazing resource for my book, and they prove, as she’s always . . .