Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live."

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.