“I needed to know that others had endured what my family was going through, regardless of the outcome.”
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“I needed to know that others had endured what my family was going through, regardless of the outcome.”
“Can you forgive me?”
“Until these collections, I didn’t believe you could write short pieces so clearly inspired by Chicano life.”
“At its core, the madness memoir is an effort to impose a literary structure on an inherently disorganized condition.”
“To sew a jacket, one must first imagine it fragmented.”
“It's a funny feeling that you get when you find out somebody set you on fire.”
“My favorite Gaelic phrase is the classic “Mo chreach ‘sa thàinig!” The literal translation is something like “my destruction has come” or “my cattle raid has come.” In 2020, Gaelic’s language for misfortune came in handy.”
“In mid-2020, a sad scatter of discarded Lonely Planet guides appeared on a stoop near my apartment. I took a photo and sent it to a friend with the caption, “You ain’t going nowhere.” To leave one place for another had become a thing no longer done.”
The death of a parent, in most memoirs, would be the book’s beating heart. Initially, this also appears true of Mill “Town, a recent hybrid memoir by Kerri Arsenault. In a beautifully touching moment near the end of her father’s prolonged fight against lung cancer, her mother guides him to the kitchen, her arms around his waist. He’s weak, on oxygen, and having trouble sleeping. His appetite has withered to almost nothing, and he’s suffering the indignity of a catheter. As they slowly make their way down the hallway, he turns to his wife. “Ain’t much of a life,” he says.”
“I came to the Beastie Boys because I had heard my peers talking about them, and I believed talked-about things were things worth knowing. My personal mission was to learn a little bit about everything I heard referenced, and to have at the ready my own opinion on each topic.”
“By describing how the practice of writing interacts with the act of listening to music, the essays in “Music for Desks” aspire to a similar magic. These pieces will be exploratory in nature—in all senses about process, rather than result.”
