Whether I believed the Antichrist would actually posses a ruby laser ring that harnessed the power of the sun into “a devastating laser beam of destruction” that could wipe out buildings in a poof, I definitely believed the Antichrist would show up and have lots of tricks up his sleeve. And I didn’t want to stick around for it. I wanted to be raptured.

The ballot box was now obsolete, supplanted by a vast, continual referendum that had rendered political institutions little more than speed bumps on the road to market efficiency.

I’m on a quest to surround myself with complex mothers. I’m going to seek them in novels, in stories I can enter during months when my own complexity seems to shine brighter. The women I’ll turn to can’t hear me when I talk back to them, but they can be my companions.

What can you do when a customer wants a book that you not only find objectionable but also believe actually dangerous in the lessons it portends amidst such a politically precarious time?

Two sons who became writers remember their parents with a fondness that will melt your heart.

The aim of each of these women, perhaps of every artist, is a longing to be understood, to make some seemingly unknowable part of the self known.

I spent years of my life thinking I would be a member of a room like that by dying. That I would be the thing no one was talking about, all anyone was thinking. I spent years imagining what those rooms might be like with me not there.

Sharing work is really like sharing your soul. My erstwhile mentee somehow managed to know what I needed to do before I knew myself.

At a time when American women can ascribe to feminism with comparatively little fanfare, insisting on one’s own humanity as a woman is still an act of monstrosity—one with which ugliness and craziness, the two things that women are supposed to fear most, is always elided.

It is good if the public library appeals to seniors, but it is not good if seniors are the only people to whom a library appeals. New generations need to use their library, need to need their library, if the library is to remain inside the tightening circle of things the government will do for its people.

On one afternoon, I saw four consecutive patients with no history of hypertension who all posted blood pressure recordings above standard values. Each blamed our recent banter about Donald Trump.

Pancake was a canary somewhere deep in the American coal mine, warning us of the methane building up, and of the explosion that would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, the canary is always the first to die.

This is not a knock on Shields—or me—because all writers are free to choose their subject matter and use their source material as they see fit.