About guns, about hunting, it's safe to say I know nothing. The last gun I fired was a musket at Boy Scout camp.
My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention.
Thanksgiving, our eminent moral holiday, doesn't have much for children. At its heart are conversation, food, drink, and fellowship - all perks of adulthood.
My father-in-law has ear hair like a wolverine. It fans out from the auricles, wafting from the ridge lines like cilia, like gray feathered plumage.
Paris's neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl - a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig's tail, a whorling braid notched one to 20.
Tintin comics evoke Bermuda, where my parents doled out comics for good behavior and my grandmother taught me how to shuffle cards.
I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedonistic way of living.
Frankly, it's depressing, each night sleeping in someone else's home. I miss having a roof to my name. Our situation isn't an 'All in the Family' cliche, but it's still easy to see reality in plain terms: I live with my in-laws, and I can't say when that will change.
Loving relatives and home-cooked meals are solid levees against a recession.
France and America have a long history of mutual loathing and longing. Americans still dream of Paris; Parisians still dream of the America they find in the movies of David Lynch.
In our town, Halloween was terrifying and thrilling, and there was a whiff of homicide. We'd travel by foot in the dark for miles, collecting candy, watching out for adults who seemed too eager to give us treats.
The great thing about candy is that it can't be spoiled by the adult world. Candy is innocent. And all Halloween candy pales next to candy corn, if only because candy corn used to appear, like the Great Pumpkin, solely on Halloween.
