Fetishes: Annotated Bibliography

“The French have a horror of the smell of cooking food, whereas Americans find it appetizing; in the nineteenth century the first French Rothschild went so far in this aversion as to have the food brought from the kitchen to the dining room on an odourless, because underground, train.” –Edmund White, The Flaneur (I couldn’t […]

The Wait

Everyone is waiting for someone. Everyone you see, his heart is an airport in an ice storm. Some people are waiting on someone to pair up with, and others are waiting for someone to stop telling that story again or to load the dishwasher or be like she used to be. Western people are uniquely […]

Household Words 3

The fact is, I only met Ellen’s parents a handful of times before I went off to San Diego. When people die, it’s natural to magnify their significance retroactively. I tried. I didn’t have a lot to go on. I observed nothing compelling about Ben and Amanda Walden. Maybe her mother’s eyes were too […]

Avoidance

Some of the most painful things that ever happened to me happened in childhood. One day after school, I sat in the car with my mom, facing the tree in our side yard, and crying and crying and telling her I was never going back to school. I had no friends. My only friend, in […]