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I’m thrilled that my essay “Crash,” published last July in the beautiful literary magazine Under the Gum Tree, has been listed as a Notable in Best American Essays 2016.

The essay isn’t available online, but you can download a digital copy of the issue here. You can read a little bit about the story behind the essay here.

I told a version of this story at my mother’s memorial service in 2000. At the time, her  death felt very much like a car crash: quick, unexpected and violent. My dear friend Peggy Tagliarino came up to me afterwards and urged me to write the story. And so I did.

Here’s a short excerpt:

“The summer I was 26, my mother and I traveled together to the south of France. She was spending a week at the vacation home of friends on the French Riviera and had invited me to tag along. I thought perhaps I was a bit too old to still vacation with my mother, but since I couldn’t afford to take a European trip on my own, I jumped at the invitation.
Being asked to spend a week at someone’s home in France was the kind of thing that happened to my mother and never h

appened to me. I had spent most of my life suspecting she was cooler than me—she was Swedish, spoke seven languages and  was a successful fashion executive—but now the distinction seemed starker than ever. While I struggled with low-paying jobs, roommate dramas and small apartments, she was thriving. At 55, her marriage to my father over and my brother and I living on our own, she threw herself into her work and friends and traveled whenever she had the opportunity: white-water rafting in the Grand Canyon, biking through Eastern Europe, skiing in Utah. Her eclectic group of friends invited her everywhere, and I could understand why; she was affable, energetic and up for anything.”