A longtime reader wrote to ask if everything’s okay. He was concerned because I post here so rarely. Everything is okay! My stepdaughter, Autumn, turned twenty-one! Often I still think of her as the little waving girl in the photo above. But she is an astounding young woman, a clear and compassionate thinker, a poet, a gift, my only child. . . .
If you’re interested, I’ve created a newsletter, ideas & intimacies, at Tiny Letter. As it says there: please, come and go as you please.
I’ve always been interested in the ways writers think about family history—and especially about echoes, or the lack thereof, through the generations—if they do, as they work. I’m grateful to Tin House for allowing me to indulge this curiosity in a new series of brief but wide-ranging interviews with authors about ancestry. First up, Christopher Beha: Maud Newton: When we first . . .
In the past couple years my mom has taught me and reminded me of a few more of my Texan granny’s favorite expressions. Some highlights: Quiet as a little mouse peeing on cotton. (Usually used when someone reacts with stunned silence to some sort of diatribe or revelation.) You can’t get all your coons up one tree. (You can’t get everything you want.) Told them how . . .