Long ago, my mother lost her French, and with it all memory of her upbringing in Franco-American Lewiston, Maine. This was why we had come to Maine that summer—not so much to capture a frisson of lost language but to recover memories, as if to grasp them like so much detritus sprayed upon the shore. […]
To read Paul Lindholdt’s Interrogating Travel is to receive a wellspring of lived experience about traveling the land and seas of planet Earth: this blue marble floating in space, our “home globe.” Having passed the critical carbon marker point of 4.24 ppm in May of 2023, we find it increasingly difficult to remain optimistic about […]
Kristine Langley Mahler, a married, thirty-eight year old mother of daughters, has reached a point of reckoning. She has worked as an administrative assistant at a university though her young adulthood, a job she describes as “golden handcuffs of half-time job with benefits.” Now it’s time for change. This lyrical memoir chronicles her journey. Kristine […]
Losing a child. As you read those words, do you have a visceral reaction? A tightening of the belly? A gasp? One does not have to be a parent to feel the fear, the pain. One just has to be human. Children die—of illness, accidents, violence—but when a child dies of suicide, as did Eileen […]
Emily Strasser’s Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History is a book for our time. In an age when intergenerational trauma is being explored and researched, Strasser is providing us with important work in this genre. In this meticulously researched book, she plunges into the world of her grandfather George. He died long […]
In 2004 I hitchhiked illegally into western Tibet, passing myself off as an Uyghur who had misplaced her identity papers. I got arrested twice, made a daring escape over a frozen mountain, pushed trucks through waterlogged valleys, and got a smashing case of near-fatal pneumonia. I also lost all my underwear (long story) and got […]
Photo by Kevin Seibel on Unsplash The summer I was pregnant, I watched with growing detachment as my breasts asserted themselves and my spreading hips echoed my mother’s. I had the urge to nest—procuring diapers and wet wipes, obsessively dusting, developing a sudden, unexpected interest in scrapbooking—and became, for a short while, someone I […]
The Greeks have a word for the desire to help people in need, explains Dana Sachs in her riveting new account of humanitarian courage, All Else Failed. She then teaches us a concept that seems alien in the extant rendition of America: Philoxenia, or “love of strangers.” In Sachs’s telling, from the shores of the […]
Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash The road is white, the color of no road anywhere. The white road becomes whiter and narrower as it recedes into a sunless, ochre-tinged sky. Everything is tinged with ochre, except one house, which is all white. The white house looks as if it’s been drawn by a […]
Teow Lim Goh’s Western Journeys delves into the heart of what it means to be an American—and what it means to not be considered American enough. Immigrants, minority peoples, and native peoples all find a place in Goh’s analysis of the American experience. Her essays also probe what it means to be living in a […]