… 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