Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

Family seems so rich and complicated to me. There's meant to be this unfailing biological loyalty and yet at the same time it's this theatre for various kinds of cruelty. I know it doesn't always work out that way, but the worst possible behaviour is sort of allowed for. It looks to me like an endlessly rich container for really terrible drama, but also pretty grand love. It accommodates such a variety of feeling in such a natural way, and it feels so relatable, and yet it's such a funny construct, socially, the family.

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I'd said that, how many times I'd meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.