“Let there be spaces in your togetherness.” When my husband and I married in 1975, we included the famous quote from Kahlil Gibran in the service at our SoHo loft, and we’ve abided by that principle ever since. In my last post I mentioned that we’ve rarely been apart for even a week in… [Read More]

As of today, my husband’s been away from home for almost three weeks, piling up the miles on his Kawasaki Vulcan motorcycle. He’s ridden from upstate New York to Louisville, Kentucky, then down to North Carolina, and back via the Blue Ridge Mountains to his sister’s home in Virginia. He’ll stop off for a night… [Read More]

I was slogging away at my new novel, writing about the tenuous boundary between reality and fiction, when I first heard the news about the horrific shooting at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises at the multiplex in Aurora, Colorado. Witnesses reported that just before opening fire, killing a dozen people and injuring scores… [Read More]

  In August of 1966, I made it all the way into the foyer of the Beatles’ penthouse suite at New York’s Warwick Hotel, about twenty feet from the bedroom where John and Paul were sleeping. It’s one of the great regrets of my life that I didn’t barge right in and wake them up…. [Read More]

Lab rats prefer Miles Davis to Beethoven – but only if they’ve listened to Miles after being injected with cocaine. When they haven’t been coked up, they prefer Beethoven – or, best of all, silence. Those critically important findings come from a study right here at Albany Medical College. As reported by Cathleen Crowley in… [Read More]

Everything’s looking so rosy today, I’m singing that catchy ditty from the 80’s, The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.”*  I’m feeling happier than I have in ages, and that scares me a little – for me, with my bipolar diagnosis, high spirits can be a precursor of over-the-top mania. But why shouldn’t I… [Read More]