Despite the fact that I have no regrets about how things turned out in my life, I still can’t help wanting to understand my intense relationship with Leo, as well as that turbulent time between...

The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests....

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

I couldn’t understand how boldness and sorrow, how you’re so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable,...

If, as PJ O’Rourke ones quipped, giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys, giving actual money and power to teenage boys (and girls) is as predictably...

I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.

You forget what it was like. You’d swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed...

If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.

For the first time in my life, I actually wished that everyone was the same. And I despised myself for my “differentness” or “uniqueness” as an individual. In the world there are lots of social...

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my youth was ending in an explosion of unreal passion. Memories like these make my life sacred and holy.

It wasn’t until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison...

It’s hard, omigod remember? Being a kid.

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound...

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we...