Here is the first sentence of my autobiographical essay “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed,” which was originally published in the New York Times Book Review of August 22, 1982. I was forty. I wrote: “This is a memoir, but please . . .
My mother bites into a Big Mac and her glasses catch the reflection of a purple neon light somewhere behind me. It is June 1979, and we are in a food court at Los Angeles International Airport. My favourite song . . .
In 1898, Paula Modersohn-Becker, twenty-two and busy with her sketches, wrote that she was reading Marie Bashkirtsev’s diary. “Such an incredible observer of her own life. And me? I have squandered my first twenty years.”
I discovered Modersohn-Becker’s Letters and . . .
Whenever I happen to meet and talk with people who are complete strangers to me but who know me, insofar as one can, only through my writings, they almost always say that they’re surprised (and perhaps relieved) to find that . . .