A son on his father's career behind the bar.

Excerpted from Two and Two.

“How do you catch someone up on your entire life?”

On how a childhood spent in New York City’s tenements led a 15-year-old boy to be convicted of murder.

An essay about what we’ll lose, and what we’ve already lost.

On becoming a stepmom.

An essay on clothing in uncertain times.

An essay on the wounded woman.

What does it mean to be polite anymore?

On chemo.

Life with chronic migraines.

“As my acting career developed, I was no longer cast as a radical Muslim – except at the airport.”

Surveillance as daily life along the Texas border.

“You are wondering what kind of people put their house pet in a cat show.”

“The patron saint of adult thumb-suckers is a 65-year-old Long Island salesman who looks strikingly like Hunter S. Thompson, down to the tinted aviator sunglasses and bald spot.”

On being a mom, a wife, and a writer.

On adolescence, pen pals, and the Manson girls.

The trouble with the all-but-obligatory networking site, “an Escher staircase masquerading as a career ladder.”

“I never knew my father, a decorated World War II pilot who died before I was born. But a trek at age 67 to the site where his airplane crashed brought me closer to him than I’d ever dared hope.”

“In some ways, joining the military is an act of faith in one’s country—an act of faith that the country will use your life well.”

“Two weeks before Christmas, I was explaining to a friend in town that if I seemed more distressed than usual, it was just because I was trying to accustom myself to the fact that my cat didn’t want to be my cat anymore. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘Here’s what you do: You just call Dawn.’ And then she gave me the cat psychic’s phone number.”

Life after losing your partner.

The view from a low point.

On claiming the conquistador Juan Ponce de León as an ancestor and the fictions we tell ourselves.

An attorney pieces together a life cut short.

The author ponders the dissolution of his own marriage, and others.