Personal Essays
This Ragged Claw
— Aeon, 2020
One day this fall, I came home from work and found, among the usual pile of bills and flyers and mass mailings pulled from the mailbox, a crisp white letter from the hospital where I’d recently had a mammogram. I am used to these letters: one appears every year, a week or two after my annual appointment, confirming my test results were normal, and that I should call to schedule another mammogram in a year.
Turning, Unfolding, Passing Through
— Guernica, 2019
I went on a walk last March with my daughter, picking our way around spring’s effluvia laid out like a carpet on the sidewalk: the crushed top of a hummingbird egg, and a black-and-red speckled insect I couldn’t identify. “It’s a ladybug larva, Mom,” my eleven-year old informed me. “Didn’t they teach you that in school?” They hadn’t taught me that in school. This creature looked like a ladybug rolled into a cylinder and pinched at both ends, a ladybug reflected in a funhouse mirror.
Death Rattle: The Body’s Betrayals
— Longreads, 2018
One morning about a year ago I was sleeping on the sofa in my parents’ apartment when I was woken by the sound of my father dying in the next room.
At first I couldn’t tell what the noise was, or even locate where it was coming from. It was a ragged, scraping sound, like metal being pulled through tightly-packed glass. Then it shifted: like someone breathing in a viscous liquid in greedy gulps, aspirating yogurt. When I realized the noises were coming from my father’s throat, I froze.
Cult Confessions: Faith and the Limits of Liberalism
— Catapult
When I was a kid growing up in the ’80s, our family spent every Christmas with my grandmother in Oneida, New York—home to the American silverware company. She, along with another couple dozen of my father’s aunts and uncles and cousins, lived together in a 93,000 square foot brick-and-ivy mansion across the street from Oneida Ltd. headquarters. The rambling building was magic in winter: mantled in snow, like a gingerbread house, with a soaring fifteen-foot tree in the central lounge, and cookie-and-eggnog parties in the dimly lit library. It was known within the family as the Mansion House (or “the Manse,” for short).
Donald Trump’s Capitalist Christianity Has Old Roots
— The New Republic, 2016
A long tradition of Christian thought encourages believers to forgo worldly pursuits—like making money—and instead focus on the spiritual prize of salvation. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,” the evangelist Matthew warns Christians, “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.”
Oneida: The Christian Utopia Where Contraception Was King
— Los Angeles Review of Books, 2016
IN 1844, my great-great-great uncle, after watching his wife give birth to one live and four stillborn babies over the course of six years, decided he had had enough of Nature, red in tooth and claw. He resolved to begin practicing coitus reservatus, or intercourse without “crisis,” as the 19th-century euphemism phrased it. The self-control required was “not difficult,” he later reported happily of his sexual experiments. He noted, in addition, that his wife’s experience “was very satisfactory, as it had never been before.”