The Best American Essays 2015

It always amused me to hit or elongate the word you in speaking to the cat, as in, “Yooouu would probably like that!” because it was funny—and funny often means disquieting and true—to remind myself that there really was another ego in the room with me, with her own likes and dislikes and idiosyncrasies and exasperatingly wrongheaded notions about whose water is better.

After years of lying to get the “child price” during my early teens, I delight in the symmetry of the subterfuge.

the benign low

The Crooked Ladder

Nazi daggers, and

between the preadoptive

that was awkward

“A fender-bender,” I repeated.

had been utterly

final jolt, the