‘My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother’.
My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother. Sometimes she abruptly stops what she is saying to me, I hear a noise in the background, she says my name, and waits. Then I know my father has come into the room during her con…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘gormandizing, gluttonous, lickerish, guttling’
Excerpts from Lydia Davis’s diary.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
‘A woman from Barnard College calls me and asks if I would please spell ‘hemorrhaging’ for her.’
‘We decided then to tell each other exactly how a typical fuck played out in our marriages. We couldn’t believe we’d never done this before.’
Fiction by Miranda July.
