Most women of a certain generation or two remember the time when their consciousness first lit upon Madonna. I was 23 -- an arrested development 23, a 23-year-old waitress, floundering for a future -- when I first became aware of Madonna. I immediately liked everything about her -- the bracelets,...

I was two months into my book contract for my first memoir when the Frey controversy broke. I was riveted to the TV much as I had been on 9.11.2001. I know it's heresy to compare a memoir scandal to the events of 9/11, but I'm just being...

There are three of us now -- my two daughters and I -- competing for one copy of Bossypants at my house. I started reading it in the DMV, waiting for my teenage daughter to take the written test. I guess she kept glancing past the glass partition between the...

Last week when Claire Dederer, author of the new memoir Poser, was the guest speaker in my Writing the Memoir class at the University of Washington, she articulated something about memoir that I believe should be taught in elementary schools where tomorrow's memoir writers are quietly...

The central mystery of my life hasn't been Is There a God? Or What Is The Meaning of Life? Instead it's been: What's Wrong with My Family? As a child on the playground, I'd recite my family's history in quick succession, my first stab at creating order of the chaos:...

Some marriages grind to a halt; two tired people lock down into a final frozen position like the wheels of rusty gears that refuse at last to mesh again. Other marriages, like mine, blow apart mid-flight, torn asunder by forces larger than themselves, viewers watching numbly as the networks broadcast...

I've long had an uneasy relationship with Christmas. When I was eighteen, my stepsister died on Christmas day. Of course, everything about that one sentence story is horrible. It's horrible to be a college freshman and lose a sibling (yes, a stepsister is a sibling) to cancer; it's awful when...

It's five days after the split, and I am waiting to meet with my attorney--the Divorce King of Seattle, from what I can tell--to discuss the parenting plan, child support, and how the bounty of my marriage is to be divided. He told me on the phone to bring the...

A year or so after he walked me down the aisle, my beloved stepfather disappeared. My parents--that's what I'd always called my mother and my stepfather--hadn't quite called it quits. But my stepfather--my dad, the only man I'd ever thought of as Dad--had dropped out of my life.

Like...

There is much about the free-floating misery of divorce that is public domain knowledge. Like the logistics of the JFK's assassination or the phrasing of the Golden Rule, no one owns the rights on these nuggets of wisdom: divorce will likely make you poorer; custody battles are bad for kids;...