Every once in a while Annie and I rev ourselves into a flurry of emails about what's happening with our kids, how we're handling it (or not), and how much it sucks to worry the way we do. On Mother's Day, we thought it fitting to share one of those exchanges, which runs the gamut from how much to pay for your child's shampoo to the tiny and humongous and inevitable failures that come along with parenting.

Meredith Maran: While you were pregnant, did you read one of those perennial news stories about how much it cost, then, to raise a kid from birth through age 18? And did that give you the crazy idea that you'd actually spend only that much? And, even crazier, that you'd be finished paying when your son was 18?

Continue Reading...

Their studies proved that incest wasn't the rare anomaly it was long believed to be. Incest happened often. It happened in normal families -- in the house down the street, in the bedroom down the hall.

A psychological phenomenon called repressed memory had allowed this outrage to go unacknowledged, even unknown. As Freud had first asserted a century earlier, the impact of child sexual abuse on young psyches was so profound that victims often lost their memories for years or decades. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were walking around with the time bomb of untreated childhood sexual abuse ticking inside them.

For better and for worse, these findings transformed incest from a dirty little secret of American family life into an American obsession. During the 1980s and early 1990s, several cultural icons, including Susanne Somers, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur, Roseanne Barr, and Oprah Winfrey, went public as incest survivors. Incest memoirs hit best-seller lists. "The Color Purple," whose protagonist had borne two of her father's babies, won the Pulitzer Prize. Sympathetic and sensational incest stories proliferated on TV news shows and after-school specials and in newspapers and magazines.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

"I can't believe it," I choked out, weeping into the neck of the man I was hugging, the man I'd been standing shoulder-to-shoulder with on the ballroom floor, watching and cheering as the electoral votes mounted on the screen.

The man put his hands on my shoulders, his tear-filled eyes gazing into mine. I felt him sizing me up, and then I felt him decide to trust me, black man deciding to trust white woman, and that's what it was all about, wasn't it? This triumph? All of us deciding to trust each other, starting now, on this new American day.

"You know what black folks are saying?" he confided, shouting to be heard as the crowd around us roared, "Yes! We! Can! Yes! We! Can!"

I leaned in close, keeping my eyes locked on his, not wanting to miss a word.

"Rosa sat, so Martin could walk," the man said. "Martin walked, so Barack could run. Barack ran, so our children could fly."

Continue Reading...

Katrine's out of town, and we had a plan to talk two hours ago. Eleven years into blissful domestic partnership with a certified Anxious Person (A.P.), Katrine knows all too well the price of violating such a plan. I glance at the clock for the 23rd time in the past 127 -- make that 129 -- minutes. I'm not imagining this. Something's wrong.

My mouth goes dry. My heart starts pounding. Good thing I took that Managing Your Anxiety class when my anxiety suddenly, inexplicably, peaked last winter. If I hadn't learned to "interrupt my automatic thinking" and "substitute coping statements," I'd be freaking out right now.

I close my eyes and take a deep "settling breath": in-in-in through the nose, out -- whoosh! -- through the mouth. I check my voice mail, in case I missed Katrine's call. "You have no new messages," the robo-voice says. Who needs new messages, I think. I have plenty of old ones. Whatever can go wrong, will. Good news is bad news's way of catching you off-guard.

The phone rings in my hand. "My cell ran out of juice," Katrine says, "and I couldn't get to my charger."

Continue Reading...

"The Bean Trees," Kingsolver's first novel, was published in 1988 to great acclaim. With 2 million copies sold, it remains in print. Eleven others followed; all told, Kingsolver's titles have sold 7 million copies. Few American writers have managed to so seamlessly merge their radical politics and commercial success. "If we can't, as artists, improve on real life," Kingsolver says, "we should put down our pencils and go bake bread." Indeed, in her new book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," she does both.

Continue Reading...

Kids come home from school speaking English; parents answer in Spanish or Farsi or Cantonese. Parents eat menudo or lavash or jook for breakfast; kids slurp milk pinkened by Fruity Pebbles. Kids grow taller and more cynical than their parents, refuse to attend church or mosque or temple, leave home, marry or intermarry, serve as translators between their parents and their own kids during bilingual holiday dinners, and cobble together a patchwork culture, an often-uneasy union of their customs of origin with new, Americanized traditions of their own.

Continue Reading...

It wasn't Keith Stephens I saw in there. Not that waxy-faced, motionless, solemnly sleeping man. The Keith I loved was an eternal kid at 24, with glossy ebony skin that earned him his nickname "Black" and a flash of white teeth his oldest sister called "his Colgate smile." The Keith I loved could never have lain there so still. He could never have gone that long without laughing, without pulling some prank that made everyone around him crack up. The Keith I loved couldn't be what his father told reporters his son had become: "Just another statistic -- just another young black man getting killed in the Bay Area."

How could it be Keith in that casket? I'd written a book about him and two other Berkeley High School seniors precisely to keep this from happening -- to Keith, to kids like him.

Continue Reading...

"Come get me now, baby," she says, but when I knock on the door of her sea-foam green stucco house, three houses down from my yellow clapboard Victorian, I hear her shuffling to the door, still in her slippers. She wrestles the door open, reaches up to wrap her matchstick arms around me, pulls me tight against her 4-foot-11, 85-pound body. "Sit with me while I finish my breakfast." I follow her into her bedroom. She lowers herself into the Naugahyde chair at the foot of her king-size bed. On the TV tray in front of her is a single scrambled egg, one slice of turkey bacon, a fist-size bowl of Grape Nuts in milk. She takes a bite, sets her fork down, shakes her head. "Everything takes so long now. It took me half an hour just to button my blouse."

Continue Reading...

Didn't. Until I picked up a copy of "Hex," the first in Estep's "horse noir" series, and was blown away by the gale force of Estep's talent. Her vividly drawn low-life characters, the wit of their interchanges set against the backdrop of their bleak circumstances, all ripped through the constraints of genre -- and my skeptical preconceptions.

Written in a chorus of six first-person narrators, "Hex" introduces the series' heroine, Ruby Murphy, a racetrack- and yoga-addicted, classical piano-playing, vegetarian drifter who has set down roots in Coney Island. Although each of the book's characters is satisfyingly strange, it's Ruby who elevates the narrative with passages like this one, describing her train ride home after a losing day at the Belmont track: "Where this morning's cargo was full of inflated hopes and swapped tips, now the mood is dour. Surly guys jab by, hurtling themselves to the nearest bar. Raspy older women set their mouths tight and disappear into the glaring burlesque of rush hour Penn Station..."

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

"Again?" I asked. Katrine and I were already the most-married couple we knew. We'd exchanged vows and rings for the first time two years ago in February, alone in bed a la John and Yoko (but without the press coverage); again the next year at a celebration our friends and family threw for us, officiated by my Baptist minister son; and once more when we registered as California domestic partners a few months later. We registered for our fourth -- and, we thought, final -- marriage when we visited Katrine's family in France last summer, where we applied without fanfare for le Pacte Civil de Solidariti, which offers more legal rights than concubinage (domestic partnership) but fewer than mariage.

"For real this time!" Katrine said. "This might be our only chance!"

Continue Reading...

"What do you mean, 'we'?" I say, leaning back into her comfy white couch. "I don't have plans."

Miranda gazes at me knowingly, a small smile tugging at her lips.

"Why don't we continue this over martinis?" I press on. "I'll buy."

Miranda's smile disappears. Like a bee poised to sting, her eyes dart to the clock beside me and -- zzt! point made -- back to me. I'm buying, all right. I sigh, pull out my checkbook, and scribble Miranda's name across a check for about the 300th time. The brittle rip as I tear it from my checkbook silences, for just an instant, the ruthless ticking of the clock. Still, I can almost hear Miranda's tsk-tsk of disapproval. If she's told me once, she's told me 300 times: I only hurt myself when I use humor to mask my feelings.

I gather up wads of soggy Kleenex, my bike helmet, my purse. "See you next week," Miranda says. Despite Miranda's admonitions I always try to leave on an up note. "Don't get up," I say, looking down at her in her leather chair. "I'll let myself out."

Continue Reading...

"What's that?" Mike asks.

"Crank," Jack answers.

"I heard that shit's tight," Mike says.

"Let's do it up." Jack shuts the door in case his mom comes home. Mike hesitates. Smoking weed is one thing. Putting something up his nose-that's what junkies do.

"C'mon, dude," Jack urges him. He pulls out a mirror and a razor blade, chops the rock into powder. He snorts a few lines, chops up some more, passes the mirror to Mike. Mike closes his eyes and snorts his first line of crank.

Instantly he's filled with the feeling he's always wanted and never had: pure happiness. All his problems -- in school, with his parents, even his zits -- vanish as if they've been vaporized by the Star Trek laser gun he played with as a kid.

Mike snorts another line. He can't sit still. He jumps up.

"Got any more of that shit?" he asks, his heart pounding in his chest.

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

Continue Reading...

Meanwhile, at the same school, classes of 10 or 15 mostly white, mostly affluent students do college-level work in well-equipped advanced-placement classes to which they are admitted on the basis of a test that rules out all but the elite few.

It is a standard brand of academic segregation, one that can be found in most public high schools. But at Berkeley High, for the past three months, there has been yet another kind of class, this one designed to close the gap between students who succeed academically and students at academic risk: In borrowed classrooms, hastily recruited, energetic teachers convene small, no-nonsense gatherings of mostly African-American ninth-graders, each accompanied by a volunteer tutor, all of them focused on raising the academic achievement of kids who have long been left behind.

Continue Reading...

The kids are white again: the shooter and the students he shot. The shooter is a boy again -- this time he's 15, a freshman -- and once again, he's a kid who got picked on at school all the time. It's another large suburban school -- there are 1,900 kids at Santana High School, in Santee, near San Diego. We don't know much about the boy who did the shooting yet, but from early reports he fit the increasingly familiar profile of the schoolyard gunman -- a white teenage boy, a misfit, in a large suburban high school.

Continue Reading...

"Make the curriculum more relevant. Shrink schools and classes. Create specialized charter schools; make every classroom a diverse, intimate learning community," say the unrepentant '60s idealists, the tenderhearted school reformers.

"Hold teachers and schools accountable," demand Republicans from President Bush on down. "Test early and often. Use vouchers to save good kids from bad schools."

And what should we do when our teenagers drop out, act out, cry out? "Shrinks! Prozac! Ritalin!" advise the bleeding hearts. "Lock 'em up!" demand the right-wingers.

Smack-dab in the middle of the country, and smack-dab in the middle of this raging national debate, on a picture-perfect campus 35 miles west of Chicago, one public high school is employing many of these methods at once, with results that are stunningly successful by some measures, controversial -- scary, even -- by others. It is an institution that appears to answer the question, "If money were no object, could our schools be saved?"

Continue Reading...