It took crashing the car while texting for my college freshman daughter to start being nice to me again. It happened three weeks into her five-week Christmas vacation, a period characterized by carelessness and defiance on her part and irritation on mine.

From the start, the vacation was a saga of… Read full post »

Kara and Edward Kennedy with their parents Joan and Ted circa 1968

Kara Kennedy, daughter of Senator Ted Kennedy, died last Friday, September 16^th at the age of fifty-one of a heart attack. A day later, Eleanor Mondale, daughter of former vice president Walter Mondale, also fifty-one, died… Read full post »

After years of trusty service and almost no repair issues, my beloved ibook finally gave up the ghost – the hinge between keyboard and screen had actually self-destructed from overuse  – and so, with great excitement, I bought a sleek, sexy new 15-inch MacBook Pro.

I figured that t… Read full post »

Most people convicted of murder are understood to have stolen their victim’s life. To have violently ripped it away against the person’s will. Not so Kenneth Minor, a 38-year-old man who was sentenced to 20 years to life this week for killing 52-year-old Jeffrey Locker. Minor’s defe… Read full post »

Recently, I was watching a cable television show with my 14-year-old daughter when, suddenly, the couple onscreen tore off their clothes and began having sweaty and graphic simulated sex. I found myself staring straight ahead, face hot, until the camera cut away.

As… Read full post »

After a whirlwind 24-hours in New York City to promote my book and attend an award ceremony, I arrived at my sister Sarah’s farmhouse in Northern Vermont ready to relax and enjoy the deep piles of New England snow.

Straight out of… Read full post »

When I first heard about Kombucha, it was from a friend who told me it was made from fermented mushrooms, a piece of misinformation I promptly passed on to numerous friends and acquaintances.

I later found out that the “mushroom” used to make Kombucha is actually a ball of yeast… Read full post »

In a hugely disappointing move, the Obama administration has abruptly backed away from supporting a frank and open discussion about end-of-life planning between doctors and their elderly patients.

Only three days after implementing a new regulation that provided Medicare coverage for doctors to… Read full post »

Okay, stop the presses, this just in: Baby boomers are in a funk!

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, forty-five to sixty-five year olds are not feeling the love. In fact, 80 percent of us are pessimistic about the way things are going in this country.… Read full post »

It may be hard to find the silver lining in the current economic downturn, but the recession has given me at least one important gift: It has cured me of my shameful habit of overspending at Christmas.

Read my piece on AOL's DailyFinance:

  Read full post »

Having known a number of incest survivors over the years, including a close friend who suffered from horrific abuse as a child, I find the notion that women might fabricate their stories of sexual abuse both unbelievable and offensive. In fact, I have always assumed that anyone who doubted these stor… Read full post »

It's a parent's worst nightmare. Last week, Nora Miller, a junior at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, committed suicide by dousing herself with a flammable liquid and lighting herself on fire at the edge of one of the University’s playing fields. She was discovered early Monday morning with… Read full post »

Some people just can’t see the humor in death. Not so the Billboard Liberation Front (BLF).

A billboard created by the Final Exit Network (FEN), a controversial right to die organization, was on display for less than a month when it suffered a flash guerrilla attack from… Read full post »

I was pained to discover that my friends seem to care more about my weird, unhealthy cat than they do about me. Thank you, Facebook.

I’ve come to realize that there are two basic types of FB users: those who post about politics, the birds in… Read full post »

Me and my two sisters, identities obscured, France, circa 1962

I was recently called out on a blog entitled “Mothers of Brothers” for using pseudonyms in my memoir, Imperfect Endings. A blogger named Jennifer (no last name) was bemoaning how all the mommy bloggers out the… Read full post »

My mother in 1955

Mother’s Day was more of a rumor than a reality when I was growing up. I heard friends talk about cards and flowers and going out to brunch but it wasn’t something we did at my house.  It’s not that I didn’t have… Read full post »

Back in the early 1990’s, Sam, a family friend with Alzheimer’s slipped undetected out the door of his nursing home and wandered into a freezing winter night. He was found the next day, dead from hypothermia, at the edge of a stream. A charming, bright-eyed man who’d never lost his… Read full post »

When my mother was planning how to end her life in 2001, she joined the Hemlock Society and arranged to have one of their “Caring Friends” come to her house. The meeting with Bud, an overweight man in a black suit and bolo tie, is one of the central scenes in… Read full post »

Dear Open Salon-ers,

I am taking the plunge and getting myself on to OS after being a long time admirer of the writing – and the writers -- on this site. I look forward to getting to know more of you in the days… Read full post »