Our conversation was boring and needlessly loud. The man had a braying laugh and mentioned his boat repeatedly, calling it “she” each time. I snuck a look at my phone: 8:17 on Saturday. I could be home in my pajamas, watching “Breaking Bad” on Netflix. I imagined standing, turning without a word and walking out.

Instead, I gave my husband a desperate look and he broke in with a question about wind and sails. The man turned, and I relaxed for a second. Next to me, I felt his wife brighten. She’d heard I was a writer and she wanted to talk about books. Specifically “Twilight.” It was her “passion” — the entire series. I nodded and drank steadily as she deconstructed each plot.

After we said goodbye and got into the car, John sighed. “Well, that was a waste of 200 bucks,” he said. Then he reached over and squeezed my hand.

We’d been searching for another couple — people to hang out with and take vacations and trade stories about our three nearly grown children — for more than a year. Ever since our breakup with Sara and Greg.

Continue Reading...

My young husband and I had moved to the Iron Range for a number of romantic reasons. We thought it was beautiful and in some way more “authentic” than the place we’d been living. We also believed the clean lake air would cure the asthma suffered by our younger son. What we failed to take into account was the 14 percent unemployment and a taconite-weary city with little but service work.

So Jim was stringing together two backbreaking, low-paying jobs and I — the 24-year-old mother of two — was trying to fill the long, icy, dark winter days. The library was my best bet. But on this particular afternoon, my nearly 4-year-old was behaving oddly. He wouldn’t sit with the other children for story time. He kept flapping his hand in front of his eyes. Twice, he jumped up and went to the wall, where he flipped the light switches madly back and forth.

Continue Reading...

I was new to the area, trailing a high-tech spouse who worked 14-hour days. The gloom had settled in. It was good weather for writing but after several hours, scenes from “The Shining” would be running through my head. I was slogging away at a second novel (my first was a tiny seller, now remaindered). I’d been a visiting professor in Providence and Minneapolis, but for the first time I couldn’t even find an adjunct job.

So this man offered to show me the city, grab a cup of coffee and talk for a while. He listened and gave me good advice. Then as dusk overtook the storm, he told me his tale.

At 30, he’d been a promising history scholar, on faculty at a major university and traveling the world. But after five years, he was denied tenure. And suddenly, everything in his life — teaching, research, sabbaticals — simply disappeared.

He fell apart briefly, then rallied and decided to write a book. It would be successful and he’d reclaim his rightful place. A few years into the project, he won a prestigious grant. And with that, he became obsessed. His marriage fell apart; he lived on next to nothing. When he finished the novel and his agent couldn't sell it, the man hired a series of editors to help him revise.

Continue Reading...

"The wake-up call is supposed to come in about 6:30," John whispers. "That means they'll be up praying and getting ready by 6. If we want to leave we'll need to be out of here by 5:30, no later."

"Is there a bus to Seattle that early?" I ask, upending our only bottle of wine.

My husband pulls the schedule out of his backpack. "6:40," he says. Outside, lightning flashes and rain pelts the roof. "It'll be wet while we're waiting."

"What about a coffee shop?" I ask. "If we find a place that opens early, we could sit there until it gets light."

He glances at my laptop, which is sitting -- in clear violation of the rules -- on the desk. "Go ahead and try," John says.

I stand unsteadily, my head pounding from two hours of questioning under fluorescent lights. I plug in the hotel's Ethernet cord and am irrationally comforted when Google appears.

After a few searches and one furtive cellphone call to a number that only rings, I turn back to John. He's sitting on the mammoth bed staring out the window, his eyes wide and glassy. "There's no answer," I say. "I don't know if they'll be open at 6. And I don't dare call the front desk to ask."

Continue Reading...

Jessie (a pseudonym -- while she wouldn’t mind using her real name, her ex would be mortified, she says) is a 31-year-old schoolteacher from New York who underwent a preventive bilateral mastectomy two years ago. For her, the decision was simple.

She had six maternal relatives who’d had breast cancer, prior to menopause in all but one case. Her own mother had been diagnosed at 26 and was dead by age 30. When Jessie herself tested positive for BRCA1 (a gene mutation that raised her chance of developing breast cancer to 60 percent, as opposed to 12.5 percent for women in the general population) her immediate response was, Why wait to get sick?

Then she looked at her partner’s face and saw panic. So she put the procedure off … for a while.

Finally, though, she decided she couldn’t live with the odds any longer. She scheduled the mastectomy, along with plastic surgery to get implants. After discussing it with her doctor, Jessie opted against saving her nipples -- an option some women choose even though it carries a small risk.

Continue Reading...

I scan the story while standing, my coffee forgotten. Trudy Steuernagel, a faculty member in political science at Kent State, has been murdered and her 18-year-old son, Sky, has been arrested and charged with the crime, though he is profoundly disabled and can neither speak nor understand. Sky, who likes cartoons and chicken nuggets, apparently lost control and beat his mother into a coma. He was sitting in jail when she died.

This happens to be two days after my older son's 21st birthday, which we marked behind two sets of locked steel doors. I'm exhausted and hopeless and vaguely hung over because Andrew, who has autism, also has evolved from sweet, dreamy boy to something like a golem: bitter, rampaging, full of rage. It happened no matter how fiercely I loved him or how many therapies I employed.

Now, reading about this Ohio mother, there is a moment of slithering nausea and panic followed immediately by a sense of guilty relief.

I am not alone.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Continue Reading...

One of my sons had landed in jail the night before, after a joy ride gone horribly awry. Now, stranded in the darkest part of night and powerless to do anything till morning, I was envisioning him in an orange jumpsuit, eating lumpen food off a metal tray. Hearing the clang of tin cups against metal bars. Seeing angry guards carrying billy clubs and criminals with shaved heads and "I Love Mama" tattoos forcing my boy into unnatural positions over a cot.

After a few minutes of lying so taut I could practically levitate, I resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to be able to go back to sleep. So I got out of bed and made a cup of tea, went downstairs, slipped a tape into our ancient VCR and rewound to some random point. Then I pressed play and there, on the screen -- like an answer -- was Erica Kane, wearing an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a solitary cell and talking to a ladybug.

Continue Reading...

We'd been married for more than a dozen years and had three children. I'd known him since college; his family was as familiar to me as my own. The sex was still good and frequent. He could fix anything. Every day, he made me laugh. But he was an addict.

I knew this when we married. At 20, I'd believed love would cure him. Then it looked like our babies might: He wrapped them in blankets and walked around cradling them in his enormous arms like someone had just handed him the secret to life. I had to beg him to put them in their cribs at night, but even while I was insisting, I glowed inside. Together, the children and I were helping him beat back the monster -- I was sure.

But over the next several years, there were signs he was, in fact, losing the battle. Bills for joint credit cards I'd never signed for would arrive. My husband lost dozens of jobs. Money disappeared. Occasionally, he too would disappear, then come back days or weeks later, gray-faced and contrite, unable to explain where he'd been. But according to the people I met at Al-Anon, all this was typical. They would sit in their church basement circles, smiling grimly and drinking decaf out of Styrofoam cups.

Continue Reading...

My husband, John, mentioned a backpacking trip through Spain that he took with his former wife, with whom he lived for a year in Barcelona; and though he is a software developer rather than an official member of the literati, this resulted in his being drawn cozily into the group. There was a long discussion about Basque food. Then a drunken filmmaker with a malicious glint in his eye turned to me and said, "So, where's he taken you?"

You know those playground bullies who could size you up immediately and figure out exactly which insult would hurt most? This guy was like that. We'd only just met, but he'd found it. My secret shame: I'm a writer who hasn't traveled much.

Sure, I've been all over the United States, and there was a study abroad program when I was 17: three months in London. But that was more than 20 years ago, and I'd returned to Europe only once as an adult, visiting Cambridge, Leeds, Edinburgh and Amsterdam. Compared with the crowd I run with, this is like summer camp at the Y.

Continue Reading...

I was at the counter cutting vegetables for dinner when my older son said, "When God talked to me earlier today, before I went to school..."

That's how he spoke as a child. He was only 11, but his diction was formal, biblical almost, and he habitually attached clauses to make his points more precise. If he heard from God, it would be important to know not only that it was today and that it was early but also that it had occurred before school.

I turned. "What did he say?" I asked. But Andrew was already gone, concentrating on something midair, eyes soft behind the thick lenses of his glasses. "Sweetheart?" Then I fell silent, too, forcing myself not to prod. Andrew has autism, and I'd learned that repeating a question only increased the amount of time he needed for mental processing. Patience -- or even just the appearance of it -- was the only way to get through.

By the time Andrew emerged from his reverie and began humming again, wagging his pencil back and forth above a rumpled page of history homework, dusk was settling in the room. The air outside had turned dim and coffee-colored. I switched on the overhead light.

Continue Reading...

There are a few downsides: Your hair will fall out, you'll be tired all the time, your mind will be muddled, and your extremities might tingle strangely. Over time, you'll likely go blind, lose a limb, end up on dialysis, or suffer a sudden heart attack. But in the meantime, you'd be able to eat anything you want and wear a size 2.

Thousands of the approximately 1 million people with Type 1 (or juvenile-onset) diabetes are willing to take the risk. Mostly teenagers and young women, they suffer from a unique eating disorder called diabulimia.

Continue Reading...

Summers full of sunshiny days and warm temperatures have meant a longer growing season and more opportunities for diversification; whereas the valley used to be appropriate only for cool-weather grapes like pinot noir and Riesling, now Peterson-Nedry is suddenly able to harvest richer, sweeter varietals, such as Syrah, Tempranillo and Grenache. The blending possibilities are endless. And Chehalem's wines improve with every new release, earning higher Wine Spectator points with every passing year. Business is booming.

But Peterson-Nedry is not pleased.

Continue Reading...

Together with my then-husband, I coaxed this little boy back: reading him poetry, drilling him with flashcards, crawling the floor in circles at his side. And when he returned to us, recovering in a way most autistic children never do, I believed the worst thing that would ever happen to us was done.

So when -- after more than a decade of progress -- my son began to regress, I didn't see it. I couldn't. I called it depression, anxiety, teenage sloth. I didn't realize the enormity of what was happening until my 18-year-old son could no longer climb a flight of stairs or tie his own shoes. Even then, it took us another year to figure out that he had a condition called autistic catatonia: a second withdrawal, even more cruel and dangerous than the first, which occurs on the far end of childhood.

Continue Reading...

In other words: pond scum. And I'm addicted.

Nights, I often disappear into my basement with a double-bagged inch or two. I handle it as if it were plutonium, because as foods go, spirulina -- the food product, a singular noun -- is outrageously expensive ($56 a pound at my local Whole Foods, on the odd days it's actually in stock) and because it stains anything it touches a dark, wet-looking green. This is why I eat it only in our dank downstairs family room with its scatter of cat toys, old computer equipment, and castoff furniture.

After I've had my fill, two or three teaspoons at most, I very carefully rewrap what's left and take it upstairs to the kitchen where my children are at the table doing homework and my husband is making tea. He kisses me and uses a paper napkin to dab a smudge from my chin. When I go into the bathroom to wash myself properly, I see in the mirror that my lips are outlined in Gothic midnight jade. But my skin, normally wan and delicate, has an almost rosy glow. And my eyes shine.

Continue Reading...

Here's how it all starts: My first-born son has autism.

Now that isn't hopeless or, in my opinion, unlucky. Autism isn't sick or crazy. It's rigid and routine, a little eccentric. Autism is multiplying columns of numbers easily while being unable to look anyone in the eyes; listening to only one band's music, and always in the same order, for a period of six weeks; refusing to eat anything orange. It's also being able to remember the exact date and time you ate a bison burger in Chamberlain, S.D., when you were 6. But there's a really charming side to all this, a wonderful tilted perspective on life that, if you're a parent of autism, you come quickly to enjoy.

I was a parent like this.

Continue Reading...

Inside Hell, however, it's another story.

The blood-red walls are hung with black fixtures and artwork by Ralph Steadman, whose leering skeletons and cartoon crows are like the "Bloom County" of the underworld. Behind the maitre d' station, handing out pagers, stands a tall, dark Elvira wearing Goth makeup -- whiteface, inch-thick eyeliner, some kind of bolt through her lip -- and a silk kimono with puffy Shrek slippers. She's scowling. The room is mobbed, she's running out of waiting space, and the post-church crowd is getting mean.

Meanwhile, a server in pink Winnie the Pooh pajamas hurries from the kitchen in back, her tray loaded with bison benedict, lemon-ricotta hotcakes, scrambled eggs with shrimp, and foie gras in black truffle sauce, plus a basket of bread and a glass pot of homemade peanut butter. She's headed for a table by the window. But as she tries to cross the entryway, a bulky guy with a mustache steps out and blocks her way.

Continue Reading...

But here, suddenly, on a rare, rainy winter night, is a sturdy specimen. He is low-voiced and gentle, but clearly intelligent. A man with a job, a full life. He is in software, a "math geek," he says with a charming tinge of embarrassment. But also, it comes out, he has read Dante, Dickens and Cervantes -- in the original Spanish.

You were married to an addict for 14 years. So you watch carefully as the wine is poured, as your date lifts his glass. You see him sip abstemiously, after using the small reading glasses he keeps in his pocket to read the label. He drinks little these days, he tells you, because he's in training.

"For what?" you ask, thinking through various middle-class possibilities. Marathons, mountain biking, the company softball team.

Continue Reading...

First, there was the rush from work to home, the nervous man at my door, and a long ride east, through rush hour, over bridges, in the murky dusk of Midwestern midwinter in that period just before the streetlights click on. Our arrival at the stroke of 6 in a windswept, ethnic neighborhood north of St. Paul: a Polish-American legion hall, a bar with a neon Miller bottle in the window, a large brick building with a pretty hand-lettered sign. Acme Tattoo.

Then there was the wait, the hardest part. A quick walk along damp sidewalks. Terse words. And finally submission to a woman in flannel pants patterned with hearts and mud-flap girls in silhouette, to her rubber-gloved hand holding a tool that looked like an electric drill but actually contained sterile needles and ink that caused my skin to burn.

"It'll feel like cat scratches," she said. And it did, only better.

Afterward, there was relief. His, mine. Vaseline and bandages. A dark evening sky and a slower walk back to the car, during which he commented, smiling now, that it might not be wise to get matching tattoos with a man I'd known for only two and a half weeks. I said no, but I wasn't really in this for wisdom. And then he asked, "So is it for the story? Are you going to write about this?"

Continue Reading...

I get it.

I'm a novelist, supporting my family as a food writer. A restaurant slut, purveyor of food porn, author of articles that liken sea scallops to blossoming roses and lamb tartare to velvet and tiny chocolate truffles to explosions that move in waves of flavor over the tongue. I've written at length about the briney, dark quality of raw oysters, the way they wriggle down the tunnel of the throat as if entering with intent. I've advised my readers to close their eyes and let the silken heft of whipped cream and mascarpone drizzled with banyuls fill their mouths. But even as I set down the words, I'm checking my watch.

Continue Reading...

The children had left for school. Ordinarily, I would have been at my office downtown, running from one staff meeting to the next, marking galleys, dashing out to Starbucks; but I'd had some minor surgery the week before and was working from home. Thanks to this convalescence, I had three chapters of a new novel nearly done. But my magazine editor was expecting an article the following day, so it was time to switch gears. I put away the fiction, checked my e-mail, poured another cup of coffee, and planned to get down to business ... right after I Googled myself.

It was a habit I'd developed when my first novel came out. Reviews would appear, people would cite the book in articles, and I would never know. Days or weeks later someone would say, "How did you like that piece in the Chicago Tribune?" and I'd run home to hunt for it. Now, I ran an Internet search every week or so and if the number of hits was dramatically higher than the last time, I'd look through to see what was new.

Continue Reading...