Search Results for: adoption memoir

  • Personal Reflections

    A Happy Birth Day Adoption Memoir

    August 5, 2016 - By 

    I’ve had a stack of black book personal journals occupying various spots in back bedrooms for many years now. They are the product of an effort for the first five or so years of my daughter’s life to provide a record, a kind of daily diary, of not only what happened, where we went, what we did and who we saw, but more importantly for two people who came very late to parenthood after long efforts to first prevent pregnancy, then to become pregnant, then to become adoptive parents, to provide a chronicle of the heart, of the vast reservoirs…

  • General Nonfiction

    Great Art From Bad People: Claire Dederer’s “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma”

    July 9, 2023 - By 

    The theme, rendered in the form of a question, recurs over and over again in the history of the arts: Why are so many creative geniuses such terrible, mean-spirited human beings? Then the second question rising from its wake, forcing a decision by all admirers of any given artist’s work: “Can I still love the art if I come to hate the artist for all his misdeeds?” (I use the masculine pronoun there with purpose, given that most artists whose creations have been admitted to the canon of so-called Great Works over the centuries have been male [and been chosen…

  • Personal Reflections

    My Guy Kai

    October 7, 2022 - By 

    There are moments in life that become, unbidden and unexpected, Big Moments, when you drink in something so delicious that it defies easy description but leaves you with a sense of profound contentment, snug down to your bones, with a peace in your heart that, in the biblical phrase, “passeth understanding.” And so it was with My Guy Kai (already shortened from “Makiah”), my recently minted (4-month-old) grandson, with whom I spent a goodly part of the past few weeks doing what all older folk with a pulse do with very young folk—bouncing him on my knee while making nonsense sounds,…