Sometimes you run across something that strikes to the core, and that was my experience in reading Douglas Stuart's short story, "A Private View" in The New Yorker, April 12, 2026. It is the first that I've heard of him but am now exploring interviews and will be anxious to read his novel, "Shuggie Bain," about a young boy growing up in Glasgow, Scotland in poverty in the 1980s. "A Private View" repeats the theme of an alcoholic mother, though as an adult, gay male, and is a tender, intimate...

I've been working on an essay about outrage, which seemed appropriate for this last year or more--I've been writing it ever since Donald Trump was elected again in November 2024. Or probably sooner, during the run-up to that election. I was satisfied with my inquiry into how I could be outraged by a neighbor, comparing that to what was happening nationally and berating myself for not saving my anger for bigger things. And then Minneapolis happened and things ramped up. My essay seemed...

Although emotional realism is more often thought of as relevant to film and literary works of fiction, it is a critical approach to the writing of memoir. Memoirs tell personal stories that involve the narrator as a character, and, by necessity, involve family, friends, co-workers, and other people in the memoirists’ lives.  A memoir proposes to take the reader on an emotional journey through a specific period of the narrator’s life or a series of events that have challenged them, and have...