When I was in college, there was another woman with my name (Julie Ward (click to read the story of her murder, the mystery of it, and the obstruction of justice at the hands of the British police)), who was murdered in Africa. I remember seeing an article in the paper about it, and clipping it out and hanging it on my bathroom wall, with a certain degree of gallows humor. I wrote on the clipping, “One Down…”, because it reminded me of The Terminator, when Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to the front door, says “Sarah Conner”, and then kills the poor woman. I know, it’s sick. I was young. But…

I came across this book in the silliest way. A few months ago, Ted and I had some time to kill at the bookstore downtown while Maya did some cheer thing or another. I had a pile of library books at home to read, so I wasn’t really looking for something to buy. I got a little bored and started playing a dumb game with myself. The game was, looking at the bookcases at the bookstore, and seeing if there were any shelves without at least one book I had read before. I was feeling pretty smug and proud of myself, seeing books that I had read on so many…

April Nash is leaving her marriage.  Leaving her husband and young son behind, traveling on a foggy road towards another life.  Unbeknownst to her, her son, Sam, is asleep under a blanket in the back seat. The car was moving.  Sam heard the rivery sound of the road under him, and he sat up, rubbing his eyes, pulling the blanket from him.  Cars were zipping past in a blur of color.  And there was his mother in front, singing along to some song on the radio.  “You are my spec-i-al someone,” she sang, and because Sam thought she meant him, he grinned.  Her voice sounded bright, like it was full…

Jeddah, gateway to Mecca, on the Red Sea. Photo found here “Despite the independence, or perhaps because he had too much of it, his childhood had provoked an intense longing for a family, a longing that lasted well into adulthood and that he was certain would never be satisfied.  His deepest fear was that he’d never marry.  Parents arranged marriages.  Parents had brothers and sisters who had children who needed to be married.  They organized the complicated social visits in which a man got to meet a prospective bride – veiled of course, but the groom could at least study her fingers and feet (unless she was socked and gloved…

I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art. ~ From the Hippocratic Oath Cutting for Stone begins with the pregnancy and birth of slightly conjoined and separated twins, Marion and Shiva Stone, orphaned at birth with the death of their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, and the disappearance of their father, Dr. Thomas Stone. Marion and Shiva are raised at the Ethiopian hospital where they are born, by two Indian doctors, who love them as their own.  They grow up amid political upheaval, though they are mostly insulated from…

In Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Freedom is something devoutly to be wished, and yet turns out to be a trap in and of itself.  It turns out, over and over again, that the trappings and constraints of life are preferable from freedom from these trappings. The story is told in the third person, telling the stories of Patty, Walter, Joey, and Richard, as well as their families around them.  Patty is the damaged basketball star daughter of a WASPy NY family, who travels to college in Minnesota on a sports scholarship.   Walter is the good son who helps his parents to tend to their motel on weekends and summers, which his…

Two days after my father had a massive stroke my mother shot herself in the head.  Her suicide was a shock – not the fact that she killed herself but the way in which she did it. It was odd that my mother chose such a violent end to her own violent life. For someone who had endured years of torture at my father’s hand, I thought she would choose a more quiet way of leaving. Perhaps she would take pills and put herself to bed in a silk nightgown, or she’d walk naked into the ocean at sunset. Instead, she cleaned the house, changed the linens, stuffed the freezer…

A 19 year old college student is approached on her way to the library one day, a man asking for help with his seriously ill dog. She goes with him, and ends up spending the next seven years of her life as his captive in an 11×11 shed in his back yard, a shed that has been fortified and soundproofed, fitted with heat and running water. She fights and is badly beaten. Tries to escape and is mocked. Struggles and screams and sends signals into the night sky that no one sees. She sleeps 16 hours a day, spends her waking hours trying to escape, watching TV, and dreading his…

image found here Robert took off his round wire-rimmed glasses and his shoes. He climbed into the bed, careful not to disturb Elspeth, and folded himself around her. For weeks she had burned with fever, but now her temperature was almost normal. He felt his skin warm slightly where it touched hers. She had passed into the realm of inanimate objects and was losing her own heat. Robert pressed his face into the back of Elspeth’s neck and breathed deeply. Elspeth watched him from the ceiling. How familiar he was to her, and how strange he seemed. She saw, but could not feel, his long hands pressed into her waist…

Mona Simpson’s newest novel, My Hollywood, explores the relationship between upper-middle class and wealthy women in Santa Monica, and the women they hire to care for their children. Claire is a composer from New York, who moves to Santa Monica with her husband and baby so that her husband, Paul, can pursue his dream of writing TV sit-coms.  She is successful enough, in that she is offered commissions, and receives a Guggenheim fellowship, and travels to New York to see a piece she has written performed.  However, they are not wealthy by Santa Monica standards, they rent their home, and she doesn’t quite understand the money of the people around…

Perhaps it was because of what had just happened to me, of the lightning that comes from inside, which made me open up to larger, stranger thoughts.  Looking up at the stars so far away, I begun to feel there was a thread running between the earth and them.  Another thread was strung out too, connecting the past to the future, with the ichie at one end, dying all that long time ago and waiting for me to find it.  I didn’t know what was at the other end of the thread.   These two threads were so long I couldn’t even begin to measure them, and where one met the…

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alice Steinbach took a year off from her job writing for the Baltimore Sun to travel around Europe in search of the self she remembers, not defined by a husband, her kids, or her career.  She is hoping that by taking an entire year to travel, she can learn to slow down, to take one day at a time, without schedules or defined goals. There is something about taking your time in each city, perhaps focusing on your neighborhood and its rhythms, that is completely different than the type of rush in, see it all, rush out type of travel that most of us can afford.  I’ve…