Diary
Jewish Book Week
I’m just back from Jewish Book Week in London, a city I now love the way I loved Paris when I first lived there—that feeling of everything to discover,
January in Paris, Scene 2: Revisiting the Sorbonne
Like most foreigners, I was required to take classes at the Sorbonne, a short walk from the Foyer. I was incredibly excited, as I took my seat in
In Search of Lost Time: Checking A Memoirist’s Memory
Paris in January is not anyone’s dream vacation: skies are permanently gray and you have to carry an umbrella. It seems particularly ill timed unless you are there for
Welcome
I’ve always been attracted to the margins of the main story, anecdotes, sidebars, and especially footnotes. Now that my books appear without footnotes, I miss them. I’ve been
How Are You?
Bobby Baker’s spectacular Diary Drawings focus on her struggles with mental illness, notably borderline personality disorders. Here, the split experienced in her mind is figured in the split
To Tell. Not to Tell
It’s hard to tell people that you have cancer. No one knows what to say and those who care feel sad or scared. But not to tell makes
BC: Before Cancer
In the first flush of diagnosis and treatment–the so-called infusions–I made several drawings about feeling the world had been turned upside down, with me in it. More than
Did You Smoke?
When people learn I have lung cancer, I’m invariably asked whether I smoked. I usually confess and say yes, I perfected the art of smoking at Paris cafés
Welcome. Some musings on my current preoccupations with the worlds of illness and the worlds of books, the vicissitudes of living with cancer and the need now, in my eighties, to imagine what new writing might be.