Many years later when I began training as a plastic surgeon, I understood something that I had not that day in the kitchen arguing for Thalia to leave Tinos for the boarding school. I learned...

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

She lived to see him turn four, and then, one morning, she just did not wake up. She looked calm, at peace, like she did not mind dying now. We buried her in the cemetery...

There is a way to be good again…

Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.

and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at...

Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: ‘Avoid them like the plague.’ Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought...

James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?

Kau masih matahari pagi yang mengakhiri yelda-ku.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the...

With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come...

Theft is the one unforgivable sin, the one common denominator of all sins. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a...

… I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you...

A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bare to lose.

Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.

She will not plant the seed in their mind, that a parent is capable of abandoning her children, of saying to them You are not enough. For Pari, the children and Eric have always been...

war. Or, rather, wars. Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust, wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for...

It’s basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn’t and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is...

Marriage can wait, education cannot.

I see a creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing, Monsieur Boustouler, and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people,...

They rarely look at Baba — the teenagers — and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to...

He was a visionary or a fool I have found the line perilously thin myself

But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really...

She passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only...

She was my mother and she would not leave me. This I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than i did the sun for shining on me.

Sad stories make good books

When Aziza first spotted Mariam in the morning, her eyes always sprang open, and she began mewling and squirming in her mother’s grip. She thrust her arms toward Mariam, demanding to be held, her tiny...

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into...

He knew I betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time.

‎I know you’re still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You’re a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want...

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to see and feel.

For you, a thousand times over

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime…

Her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head.

If there was a God, he’d guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I’d cut loose my pain, my longing.

To see her, amid all of it. To see that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

Exploitation to finance a beach house in Hawaii was one thing. Doing it to feed your kids was another.

Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is.

Mamà believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. She also believed it was always best to tell the truth, to tell it plainly, without fanfare, and the more disagreeable the truth,...

At times , he didn’t understand the meaning of the Koran’s words . But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue . He said they...

I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

There is only one sin. and that is theft… when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.

And that, …is the story of our country, one invasion after another…Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we’re like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

She thought of Aziza’s stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.