Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn't love me - I felt the wash of her love every day, pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.
Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.
While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.
But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?
I like birthday cake. It's so symbolic. It's a tempting symbol to load with something more complicated than just 'Happy birthday!' because it's this emblem of childhood and a happy day.
I am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son; she is the first gesture that creates a quiet that is full enough to make the baby sleep. My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen.
It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.
I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.
It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.
We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart.
Glen Hirshberg's stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content -- the stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader's brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing. It's a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg's storytelling skills in American Morons.
With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgandies and matte reds.