Category: Non-fiction

For many winters, I spent considerable mental energy trying to figure out—as tens of millions are probably doing at this very moment—how to keep squirrels from controlling the birdfeeder. Day after day, I would watch from the sidelines as dominant squi … Continue Reading

The refuse of my disease isn’t orange pill bottles or syringes. You won’t find used needles or vials on the floor or in my pockets. You won’t find anything, but if you could, you’d see only fat bottles—emptied. The big bottles wait for me at the store. … Continue Reading

My mother is an escort and an adult-actress, not a prostitute, call girl, hooker, whore, porn star, or streetwalker. Yes, she has a website and no, you can’t have the address. An escort doesn’t trade money for sex. She makes her living exercising the c … Continue Reading

My dad and stepmom run a motel in upstate New York. It is not for the upper crust. It is more for the pizza crust. In the summer my dad would host a cookout and invite everyone. One of the guys that Dad was friends with took me with him to the Price Ch … Continue Reading

There was a time in Greenwich when people kept a car for more than a year and could look at their house and say, “Maybe this is enough.” When my grandparents, Jean and Dean Barker, moved to Greenwich in 1968, it was actually a pretty ordinary town. The … Continue Reading

Dad was dying. I was the only one of the children without a steady job and so the obvious choice to fly down to Florida and navigate him through to the end. The morning after I arrived at his condo, he entered the hospital for the last time. There were … Continue Reading