Posts Tagged ‘abuse’
Little Girls
August 15, 2019
It wasn’t until I read about the school uniforms that I thought the Jeffrey Epstein case had anything to do with me. The story broke right before we went on our too-short summer vacation to the borrowed house overlooking the blue Atlantic. There, I sat on the deck with my laptop and read all the…
Read MoreMaya Angelou’s Caged Bird and Me
August 15, 2018
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings —Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “Sympathy” I first read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was thirteen. I discovered the book through an interview with Fiona Apple, one of the many female singer-songwriters whose mournful lyrics poured through my boom box speakers while…
Read MoreLooking for Release
October 18, 2017
This post originally appeared at Good Letters on May 9, 2012. Dayne, my mother’s ex-boyfriend, spent his childhood in Tennessee, where he got his southern drawl and where his father, who drank, would stomp through the house and sweep his long arm across the crowded kitchen counter smashing greasy dishes onto the linoleum. It was…
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