Growing up, I never wrote about Dallas. In the bedroom where I felt closest to happy, I scribbled stories on college-ruled notebook paper about a precocious girl in Maine (like Stephen King) or a troubled teen in Los Angeles (like the actresses I hoped to resemble) or a sophisticated woman in New York who probably . . . Read More

I had a hard year. A lot of people had it harder, a fact I reminded myself of constantly. I never got Covid. Nobody in my family got Covid. I had a solid roof, a warm bed, a loyal and outrageously handsome cat, and a series of microwaveable Amy’s frozen dinners that people in other . . . Read More

My college boyfriend introduced me to Joan Didion. He gave me his dog-eared paperback of Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I remember turning to the picture of Joan on the back, young and pretty and serious. I remember the poetic allusion of the title that was lost on me, because I never read poetry.  “I really think . . . Read More

I hope you get a chance to listen to my “America’s Girls” podcast, or at least rate it five stars, or at least tell a friend, or at least don’t confuse it with the American Girl doll, which would be disheartening. Over on the Texas Monthly site, I’ve been writing “behind the pod” essays about . . . Read More

I grew up watching women’s bodies. I think it started on movie screens, but it moved to television and locker rooms and swimming pools. I watched their suntanned shoulders in halter tops, I studied the parting waves of their tumbling hair, and I wondered if my body would ever have that kind of magic. There . . . Read More

The first night we spent in each other’s company, I slid into the passenger seat of his car and flipped through the songs on his stereo. He had one of those screens that was probably standard, but I’d never seen it before, having spent the past six years in the backseat of yellow cabs during . . . Read More

The young woman jangling keys to the dressing room is wearing an Iron Maiden shirt. Three items drape over my right arm, all of them designed for her demographic, but that shirt is straight out of mine. My older brother used to listen to Iron Maiden, a blunt counter-point to my Whitney Houston, and the . . . Read More

The Lonesome Dove miniseries rolled into town in 1989, when I was fourteen years old.* Back in the before-times of the late Eighties, computers were clunky green-screened things known to your serious nerd variety, and the television was the center of the household. We built cabinets around our televisions, we kept drawers underneath it,  in . . . Read More

In my fourth decade in this state, I finally became a real Texan: You Haven’t Driven in Texas Until You’ve Driven a Pickup Truck “When I first heard about this “car culture” issue, I knew what I wanted to write: an ode to my Honda Accord, which I’d driven across the country a half-dozen times. . . . Read More

On a blustery Saturday, I decided to bake bread. It was 10:30am, and I had never done such a thing before, but I imagined myself in the kitchen kneading the pale powdery squish of the dough with my hands, folding toward and pushing away. I’d recently bought a recipe book from an old hippie commune . . . Read More