Sublime

When I was growing up, we went to New Orleans annually. I do not remember which visit it was when she took me to the Bourbon Orleans Hotel. But I remember her finger, slender with heavy knuckles, like mine have become, pointing at the plaque “Former Site of Holy Family Sisters Convent.” The unmentioned historic purpose of the ballroom was that it s

I am being paid to be disposable, to sell clothes that are disposable, to sell something I have no right to sell, to be someone I dislike, to be uncomfortable, until I can no longer see my whole self because I also see what they see and give it willingly.

Pearl had understood the hierarchy: her mother’s real work was her art, and whatever paid the bills existed only to make that art possible.

But I returned to an America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up. It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker. And this wasn’t just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated people’s attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting hard

The food at Mother Earth’s was pure and natural and extraordinarily expensive. You paid more these days for the things you didn’t get—no sodium, no fructose, no corn syrup, no MSG, fat-free, carb-free, dye-free, wheatless, flourless, sugarless—and with each ingredient that wasn’t included, the price increased. A box of nothing—free of poisons, toxi