'Our relationship, in fact, hasn't seemed to need more attention to theme or direction but has proceeded or at least persisted on autopilot, like a small plane flying out over a peaceful ocean with no one exactly in command.'
Nowadays I end up driving over once a week to pass a jolly-intimate evening on the Jersey Shore with Sally Caldwell. We often attend a movie, later slip out to some little end-of-a-pier place for an amberjack steak, a pitcher of martinis, sometimes a stroll along a beach or out some jetty, following…
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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.
‘It was my child’s outlook to think most things were right. And yet if life’s eternal drama is of events seeking a more perfect state, their life and mine was not that.’
‘Occasionally if pushed or annoyed I'll come right out and say it: I make these little buggers up, that's what. So sue me’.
‘It may be that writing fiction, imagining agencies, is my most trusted way into the unseen.’
‘Madeleine Granville was standing at the hotel window of the Queen Elizabeth II, trying to decide which tiny car far below on Mansfield Street was her yellow Saab’.
‘Austin turned up the tiny street – rue Sarrazin – at the head of which he hoped he would come to a larger one, one he knew, rue de Vaugirard, possibly, which he could take all the way to Josephine Belliard's apartment by the Luxembourg Gardens.’
