I've given birth to two children by scheduled Cesarean section, so I never had to spend a moment in actual labor. Is it true that many women forget the painful hours they spent in natural childbirth? I read somewhere that nature created some mechanism in us by which women do, indeed, forget so that we'll be willing to have more than one child. If it's true, I think I could compare the writing of Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts to a kind of natural childbirth. Sometimes I look at that tidy book with its dark, evocative cover and wonder just how in the heck it got here.  Continue reading...

The summer I was 17, I worked at a camp in Northeast Ohio, on the Lake Erie shore. I was courting the girl who would later become (and still is) my wife, and many nights we would be up late, watching the slow progress of the oreboats and gazing at the stars over the water. I was on maintenance, and, being the only one who could drive the tractor, I had to get up at five-thirty in the morning and coax the old red Farm-All to life and hook up the homemade, plywood-sided trailer so we could collect the camp's garbage and scrub the latrines. I didn't sleep a lot that summer, but late one night, or more exactly, early one morning while I was enjoying my two hours of rest, the state police knocked on the door of the male staff's dorm.  Continue reading...

I've always wanted to be a scientist. But in the early 1970s, the pull of the hippie movement was strong. After dropping out of the University of Michigan, I married a stoneware potter, and for several years my husband and I made our living traveling throughout Michigan and surrounding states selling his work at art shows.  Continue reading...

My close friend is a family therapist and once told me her favorite clients are children with non-verbal learning disorders, because of their loving dispositions—naiveté, clumsiness, big hearts, and an utter inability to connect with other children. She loves that they talk too close, constantly knock things over, say the wrong thing, and still get lost on the way to the restroom down the hall in an office they've been coming to for five years. Often they can't walk up the stairs and talk at the same time, their clothes are inside out and their lack of motor skills means they can't brush their own teeth. If you tell them to jump in a lake, they probably will. Frustrating, to say the least.  Continue reading...

From Three Percent, the blog of the University of Rochester publishing house Open House Books, comes word of a stupendous literary feat. The French writer Mathias Énard has published a 517-page novel entitled "Zone," and the whole thing (aside from a few pages of flashbacks) consists of a single 150,000-word sentence! Don't know French? No problem: Open House is publishing an English translation, due out in 2010.  Continue reading...

Once upon a time, my husband and I went to Vienna on a vacation and fell in love. Not with each other -- we'd already done that -- but with the city.  Continue reading...