Literary Nonfiction

Kim McLarin explores the perils and benefits of aging.

When my father could no longer live independently in the home where I was raised, my brother and I cleared the place out and sold it. My brother claimed a bounty of bric-a-brac from the house, including two sets of dinnerware, a snowblower, and my mother’s wedding dress. Over and over again, he and his …

I am seventeen and driving fast on a two-lane highway with the windows open. It’s late afternoon, that hour when the day’s edges are singed gold. I’m alone, and because I’ve just recently gotten my license, this aloneness is a thing of wonder. The light in the Long Island sky seems to be telling me …

It takes very little to become a difficult patient. Having questions, feeling unexplained or anomalous pain, being uncajoled, seeming nervous for one’s first dose of chemo. The nurse looked at me sideways as I walked into the chemo-complex, and asked, “Are you all right?” as if I should have been. As if I looked excessively …

Gliding like giant fish past our villa, sometimes Dubai’s city buses, with their whirring, unsettle me—the long sigh of the air conditioning let out as exits unfold their mechanical arms and passengers spill onto the sidewalk. When we first arrived in the United Arab Emirates eighteen months ago for my husband’s job, I tried hard …

1. The chair was designed to withstand knocks and blows, the biting waters of the sea. 2. It’s known as the 1006 Navy Chair, first built by Emeco, the Electric Machine and Equipment Company, in collaboration with Alcoa, the Aluminum Company of America. 3. Commissioned in 1944 by the US Navy to be used on …

I am playing the role of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story, says Agnès Varda as she guides us through her memories, reflecting on her life as an artist and filmmaker, with beaches as the connective thread. Memories like these compose an identity, make life understood. The North Sea …

Like a lot of people, I imagine that if I make my telepathic frustration with whomever NPR is interviewing strong enough, I can call it activism. And then I am angry at myself for being one more ineffectual, self-satisfied, ego-driven jackass yelling at the radio. Like anybody, I like to look at pictures of animals …

1 Teh-chang came home a couple of days after the surgery, wheeled out of the hospital with a cotton bandage wrapped around his head cartoon-style and, even stranger-looking, a white mesh Styrofoam netting gathered into a point on top of that, which made him resemble a delicate fruit packaged for long-distance transportation. He had survived …