"The misery endured during those four months at Donner Lake in our little dark cabins under the snow would fill pages and make the coldest heart ache. Christmas was near, but to the starving, its memory gave no comfort."

So wrote Virginia Reed forty years after she...

Every so often I discover I'm still comfortably carrying a little backpack of my Catholic baggage. Right now, during the holiday season, just like every shopping mall, it's filled with angels.

That I find the multitude of angels around me -- on evergreens, in stores and...

Publishing my first novel at 47, I missed the chance to be one of America's Top Novelists Under 40. Now that I'm eligible for America's Top Novelists under 100, they don't have such a category -- nobody gets old in America. You know what they say: Old writers never die,...

Several of my friends call their mothers by their first names, and it always pulls me up short. I understand the practice intellectually: My friends are trying to signal a shift in the mother/child relationship to standing eye to eye rather than eye to belly button. They want to get...

The email I've been waiting for didn't come again. Darn. This is getting to be a big disappointment. I have checked both my email accounts every 10 minutes for the last two years and in all those thousands of times it hasn't come.

You might ask what the heck am...

These days I get two questions a lot.

The first: Do you think you're Tamsen Donner reincarnated?

The long and the short answer to that is Nope.

Why such a curious question? Well, after writing off and on for over thirty-five years about Tamsen Donner, I won the writer's lottery,...

Human flesh on the menu for the Donner Party or not? That burning question is back in the news again.

Americans have a hard time remembering last week's crook or celebrity, but we seem to have lasting fascination with the ill-fated pioneer party from 164 years ago. Well, at...

When a personal trainer at Gold's Gym in Venice told me that The Reader was the best movie he had ever seen, and a research psychologist in Colorado emailed me the same thing the next day, I raced to the theatre.

The Reader, nominated for five Academy Awards, is about...

Our blood is thin from California living, and my husband, Roger, had a broken arm, but we braved the cold and the crowds and went to the Inauguration. We stood on the mall with two million other joyful people and were glad we didn't need a restroom quickly.
...

I booed Bush. I stood on the Mall on Inauguration Day in a crowd of two million people and, without a moment's hesitation, booed the forty third president of the United States. That was a first for me.

I was taught that booing was rude, or as Chris Matthews said,...