One day, I was sitting behind my desk, busy in my thoughts, cataloging books, checking orders from bookstores, when a pile of thick volumes landed in front of me with a bang. I raised my eyes. ‘Is it all that you have?’ I heard a boy’s voice. I saw the titles so familiar to me, The Treatment of Mental Diseases, Postnatal Depression, Psychiatry:...
My first husband was Christopher’s close friend, a rich aristocrat with his own palace, suitable income, servants, horses, and carriages. He could have chosen any girl in the neighborhood, but instead, he chose me. We discouraged him, told him about my condition, explained our sins. But he fell head over heels in love. He gave me jewels, he made sure that servants did...
Yes, we kill. We have lived with it for centuries. But don’t overestimate our guilt. We watch carefully what is going on around us. We travel to battlefields, wait to drain the dead. We are always there where there’s a bomb explosion, a plane catastrophe, a terrorist attack. We follow plaques, earthquakes, car crashes. We are always there just before death. We are...
I always think about that day, that day in September, when leaves were slowly turning into yellow dry handkerchiefs and we were looking at the world from behind the bars. We were in an asylum. I was taken there by my father and his second wife. He, a widower, didn’t know what to do with an unmarried thirty-three-year-old woman who refused to eat,...
