Personal
NQKing lecture
This Tuesday will be the first Noel King memorial lecture, or in this case, conversation. Noel died two years ago, and we hope to make these events a regular part of life at UC Santa Cruz. Do join us. (Click on poster to enlarge.)
Read MoreMoving on
As of today, I no longer own a house in England. And I’m surprised to find how disturbing that is. This was my husband’s house, which he and his first wife bought in 1967 when he got a job in California, and she wanted a place in England for when their children were on holiday…
Read MoreLoving Ruth
Yesterday morning, news reached me that the woman who had picked me from a pile of obscurity had died. 92 year-old Ruth Cavin, the legendary Ruth, who started her career at the age of sixty and overnight seized the heart of the publishing industry; whose eye went to the essence of a book’s strengths—and weaknesses;…
Read MoreLRK, Fernando Pessoa, and coffee
I came to Lisbon to write. I got here Friday, following a lot of travel and those days of chaos that precede a long trip, and managed to check my email. Period. The rest of the day was travel and catching up with my daughter and son in law, who have lived here since October.…
Read MoreA dreadful Choice
Sometimes, life is hard and all you can do is bleed. My friend Ayelet Waldman has a new book out that fills me with awe, that a person can feel so free about showing her wounds to the world. The title of her book, Bad Mother, embraces a criticism and turns it on its head,…
Read MoreArmageddon and other inconveniences
The world ended today, here in Santa Cruz County. Vandals cut through several fiber optic cables and dumped a hefty patch of Northern California into the 1980s. Tens of thousands of people were completely cut off from the world. Computers did not communicate, cell phones went silent, land lines hummed with the noise of desperate…
Read MoreGod and the common cold
I have a cold. I have a snorting, hacking, eye-weeping, sore-throat, pounding-head, hard to sleep kind of a cold, despite all the herbal and chemical remedies in the world. I got it in Hawaii (which just seems wrong) and it’s now reached the pinnacle of disgusting awfulness. I’ve lost five days of writing time because…
Read MoreNoel
My husband Noel died yesterday. Many of you were aware that he was ill for a very long time, following a 2006 stroke and then cancer diagnosis, and anyone who has had a loved one linger will understand that the sorrow is strongly colored with relief. It is odd, but somehow appropriate as well, to…
Read MoreZombies in the family
I don’t talk about my two kids much here, because I’m a great believer in the family’s privacy, but you have to know how proud I am of them, right? Well, yet another example of how the two of them just make my heart glad appears on the local paper’s web site–here, just take a…
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