“As a child, I was a collector of ghosts, and not the kind that wail in the dark, but the kind that lie still and hollow in the sun. My mission on hot, dust-licked afternoons was to find the hard, reddish-brown exoskeletons of crayfish. They would appear at the marshy edges of Lake Naivasha, abandoned like tiny suits of armor after a battle. I would cradle these brittle shells in my palm, admiring the way their segmented plates had once formed an impenetrable shield. Even dead, they held their shape. Even empty, they looked invincible.”

“Last fall, I couldn’t eat enough apples. Macouns, with their crisp paper-white flesh and deep red dappled skin accented by splotches of green, proved infinitely compelling. I dallied with Cortlands, Jonagolds, Baldwins, Northern Spys, and the citrusy, French-descended Orleans Reinette, but I kept returning to the classic simplicity of Macouns. I ate one nearly every day, and when my supply ran low, I grew anxious, like I was going to miss out on some vital nutrient.”

“Driving from the Montana Book Festival in Missoula to our home in Portland, my husband Kevin and I stop for a night in Wallace, Idaho. Wedged between mountains and conspicuously old-timey, it’s the closest thing I have to a hometown.”

“I’ve heard it said that the key to loving New York is learning to live with perpetual loss. The longer you stay in this inconstant city, the more rubble accumulates on the map etched into your psyche.”

“In August of 2022, I rode the purple line from Evanston into Chicago. I was going to Madison and Halsted. Madison and Halsted is a mythical place in my imagination. It’s the intersection where fifteen years prior, in 2007—after crashing my bicycle into an opening car door and banging my head on the pavement, unhelmeted—I rose from the ground, amnesiac, though I would not realize it right away. Right after the crash, I dusted myself off like nothing had happened and walked away. It was only a block or so later, when, as I stopped to look at the street signs, I realized I had lost my memory. Whatever existed before the accident was a giant, impenetrable unknown.”

“San Francisco began, for me, with anticipation. Every summer when I was a child my family would drive there to visit my grandparents, a two-day trip that for my brother was hell, and for me was a socially acceptable way to listen to music and daydream for hours on end. San Francisco would bloom in my imagination on that drive, detail by detail: the cotton-candy houses, the steel-toed street punks.”

“Where my grandmother gave me bridge lessons and kept Sunkist fruit gems in her porcelain candy bowl. Where I did not give my pet cactus enough water. Where we shot our BB gun at the lemon tree in the backyard. Where I wore my Redskins 1994 NFL Champions T-shirt so many times it got holes. Where my older brother slept on the empty bottom bunk when I could not fall asleep.”