My father described his infidelities “playfully, with only a dash of contrition.” That is a sentence I wrote in my novel The Monuments of Paris, and it is also, as closely as I can render it, somet…
Not long ago, I decided spur of the moment to attend an estate sale in my Washington, DC, neighborhood. As I walked the few blocks to the address I’d seen advertised, I admired the beauty of the la…
My mother married my father because she was fainting in the streets with hunger. She told me this one morning as she was getting dressed when I asked her, again. I wanted a story about a moonlit pr…
