On “Rapture Saturday,” I crossed old town Nicosia’s Green Line to wander the Turkish side of this divided city: a shabbier copy of its Cypriot twin, boasting a similar rabbit warren of half-shuttered shops but a higher density of dumpsters and fake leather goods, and so more potent wafts of these sharp perfumes. The wares…

The following was delivered at the Image Seminar in Charleston, SC, on November 6, 2010. The theme of the event, which featured novelist Bret Lott, was “Risking the Heart: Telling True Stories in an Age of Irony.” Confessionals have always fascinated me: the photo-booth dimensions, the heavy red drapes or wooden doors; the imagined intimacy…

Two weeks ago I put on the moss agate ring my great-grandmother won selling magazines in the red dirt of her Oklahoma girlhood. I still wear a wedding band and it keeps the moss agate’s roomy rose-gold band from slipping off my finger. But the wedding band can’t keep the moss agate steady and the…

It is last night, many nights and years ago, a night when I drank a glass of wine and then I cut my hair. The wine I drank from the fat bulb of a fine crystal wine glass—the finest glass we owned, one of a wedding gift pair, against which all cheap plates and plastics…

The Pill’s fiftieth anniversary year is an odd occasion for me, the daughter of young parents who stoked their fiery love affair with accidental babies. Despite the pink plastic nautilus of Pills in our mom’s make-up tray, despite the condoms we found when we looted our dad’s sock drawer for impounded Nintendo controllers, my parents…

The Vienna Secession’s new exhibit of Gustav Klimt’s Beethovenfries strikes me as somewhat apt for the artist, a man whose “Self-Portrait as Genitalia” looks at first glance like a cartoonish satyr stuck to the body of a chicken—but, on closer observation, reveals goateed Klimt with a haunch of engorged testicles and the plumage of an…

In the swelter of Ghana’s heat this past December, I rummaged through my suitcase and found the dress I bought the morning after Rachel’s wedding. It is not a dress anymore. It has not been a dress for years, not since the lean season when I needed new work clothes and my mom cut it…

The most beautiful things in Ghana are green oranges: as pale and dimpled as hedge apples from an Osage Orange and oblong, as if shaped by hand. When I walk home in the evenings, I pass the girls selling green oranges at wooden tables along the road, each arranging twelve of her best on the…

I was twenty-three and living three blocks from the dome of the U.S. Capitol—or, as my dad soon took to calling it, “the Bull’s Eye of the Western world” —on September 11, 2001. When the plane hit the second tower, I watched the impact on a scratchy analog TV from my desk at my first…

Two days after Obama’s inauguration, the crowds barely gone and the Mall barely cleared of trampled water bottles and blankets, the March for Life came to town. It was a Thursday and I headed to work early, looking forward to the post-inaugural respite of an empty metro train. Instead, the turnstiles and trains were crammed…