She tells me that she’s met someone and I flinch because I don’t want to hear it. I am truly happy for her, her first boyfriend at 28, lord knows she’s waited long enough, but still. And then this: “I really feel like the universe is, like, rewarding me for…

If you learn your first lessons about love from your parents, then my first lesson was that it was a burden. An unwieldy thing that someone was always asking you to carry, making as if it were a gift, one that you had not asked for, but that you had…

To all appearances, I have had a busy but unremarkable year. The last nine months have rolled along like so many before. I delivered work on my accounts, spent two weeks wandering another country while contemplating time, space and my passage through it, ate nice dinners, took long walks, drank…

It was sparked in 1998. That spring, I backpacked around England, Ireland and Scotland with a friend and then took a connecting flight to Rome on my own. Previously, I had only visited Italy with my parents, as a family. And weeks before this trip, I had officially broken up…

When I was a child, I didn’t understand that my mother was a beauty. I only saw her eyes, perpetually dark with fatigue, only heard her voice, tense, barking out my name. Every day, I felt her annoyance with me, her dissatisfaction with what I did, what I didn’t do…

So that thing about Italian mothers and guilt is true. If you understand anything about Catholicism, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. When you are made to believe that your every move, your every word, is being recorded by an unseen power that will determine your fate, guilt is your…

My name, the syllables that I have known the longest, other than mama, speaks of my yearning every day. If nomen est omen — if the name is the sign — then my name is a tightly knit tapestry of who I am, what I love and where I come…