Selected Essays
“Eating America,” Gastronomica, Volume 22 Number 3, Fall 2022.
“For me, food has come to offer liberation as much as connection, a source of welcomed newness—honoring nerve and curiosity, a way into an America whose boundlessnesses my immigrant grandparents could not bring themselves to embrace.”
“The heavy tubing taped to my head was slowly unwound in the hospital, and I was left lashed to the lumbering machine—watching what used to be invisible to me, observing what used to be whole disassembled before my wondering eyes.”
“We live in a world of disruption: migrating birds thrown fatally off course by urban lights and noise, the seas rising as glaciers melt. In Miami, salt water soaks suburban lawns, fish swim in low-lying parks. Pluto has been demoted from one of the nine planets in the solar system that we see in the nighttime sky to a large rock orbiting the sun! To be ill is, yes, to be similarly called out of the world that we count on, the reality that we take for granted. But it is also to be called more deeply into the world, to be immersed in its messiness and its movement, its ability to surprise and its mystery.”
“My Mother, My Story.” Journal of Medical Humanities, March 2017.
“Surely most of us—caregivers and writers—who bring the power of narrative into the hospital and the sickroom share the same commitments to optimism and decency, to realizing fully our own humanity. And at the familiar fault line of the body, a great deal about what it means to be human is vividly revealed.”
“My Mother, Gardening.” New England Review, Summer 2013.
“Isn’t this what we all dream of, the promise of forever starting over, the human means of making new life and—even— beauty still close at hand? My mother reaches deep into the thicket of stems and blossoms, expertly feels with her eyes closed for what has died, and nips it between two fingers, drawing it out, dropping it into her bag, and moves on.”
“In evoking a level of alienation that neither narrative nor America could heal, the Education called for and modeled a new kind of American text—one that recognized the arrogance and the naivete of modernity.”
“In the postwar years rationed hunger was let loose on a whole new world of goods, visible manifestations of the possibilities of upward mobility that were renewed in the boom economy. More even than symbol, the material world became a theater of transformation.”
“In the bright light that sang over our block in summer, lush lawns coasted, cosseted beneath elms and oaks and lindens that reached, nearly touching, across the quiet street. It was more than a vision to my father, though, more than upward mobility. It was an opening up before him of grand possibility, his chance to take the world—solid wood and brick; green growing life—in his own bare hands and to remake it around himself and around his family. He pored over gardening and home decorating manuals, generating plans.”