I was driving the long solitary highway to Alaska when the guy in the passenger seat asked if I knew Fountains of Wayne. Was that a statue? Was that a waterfall? It was a band, he explained, named after a store in New Jersey. That guy was not my boyfriend, but I hadn’t given up . . . Read More

The road back from a road trip can be a drag. I’d taken three luxurious days to drive out to West Texas, drawing a crooked line to the left corner of the state, but I was returning to Dallas in one long afternoon, a mostly straight line along the bright blue vein of an interstate. . . . Read More

Last July, Texas Highways magazine asked if I had anything to write about, well, Texas highways. Oooh, I did. At least, I had an idea for a trip I’d like to take — out west, where the stars burn so brightly in the sky they look like pinholes punched in black velvet. (A line I . . . Read More

Last Saturday morning, I woke before dawn in the cozy loft bedroom of my friends’ Tribeca apartment. For mysterious reasons, I’ve been waking up early for the past two months, sometimes as early as 3:30am. I badly wish I could sleep longer, but I’ve also grown fond of these dim and hushed hours before the . . . Read More

A couple years ago I started taking pictures while I was driving. This is a terrible habit, one I would never endorse, and completely borne of the social media age, with its tug toward performing rather than experiencing your life, trying to pin down exhilaration for later consumption as opposed to enjoying it in the . . . Read More

Years ago, when I was finishing my first book, I got a solid piece of advice. Write your second book while waiting for the first to publish. A book often takes a year to go from final draft to bookshelf, and in that lag time, anxiety blossoms. Writing a second one fast, soon, now would . . . Read More

I am standing at the desk of an immigration officer at London’s Heathrow airport. The man flips through my passport. “And what is your business here?” he asks, not looking up. “I’m a writer,” I say. It took a while to put that down on official forms. I usually put editor, and then sometimes I . . . Read More

The flight was from Denver to Aspen, where I was headed for a literary thing. The flying time was 25 minutes. The captain told us it would be bumpy the whole way. That’s when you know it will be bad — when the captain feels the need to warn you. I used to be an . . . Read More