I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.
I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.
My brother was born without taste or the desire to be professionally lit.
I couldn't help but think, This car is taking me to a mental hospital and my mother is treating it like open-mic night at a Greenwich Village caf?.
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron.
I did not consider him to be any kind of a genius. I considered him deeply lacking in the area that mattered most in life. Star quality.
My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car.
I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.
Nobody's trying to kill you, Deirdre. You're killing yourself.
I just look at her and she creeps me out. She looks like she would eat a baby. Not that she's fat. She just looks hungry in some dangerous way that can't be explained. She's always so nice and friendly. Exactly the disposition of a baby killer.
Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
I knew that he was as reliable as a mathematical formula.
Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.
I love her handbag. Inside are papers and her wallet and cigarettes and at the bottom, where she never looks, there is loose change, loose mints, specs of tobacco from her cigarettes. Sometimes I bring the bag to my face, open it and inhale as deeply as I can.
The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.
I missed him so much that I had physical sensations of loss, all over my body. Like one minute I was missing an arm, the next my spleen. It was making me feel sick, like throwing up.
The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.
I referred albums to the more modern eight tracks. Albums came with sleeves which reminded me of clean underwear. Plus, the pictures were bigger, making it easier to see each follicle of Tony Orlando's shiny arm hair.
We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover.
I was learning that if I lived slightly in the future-what will happen next-I didn't have to feel so much about what was going on in the present.
Well, you know, just some old man all alone. God, I hope I don't end up alone like that. Some pathetic old woman with nobody to go on a whale watch with.
I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead
What nobody understood then is this: The only way that you achieve what you want and fulfill your dreams and become great is by demanding that sort of attention. You have to make it happen.
And that was one thing I didn't want: NO CASUAL SEX. I thought it was disgusting, the idea of just screwing around and then that's it.
I wish I had a tray table in my bedroom and I wish I smoked, just so I could extinguish my smoking materials
You deserve to need me, not to have me.
But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.
I would borrow the microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants, examining myself from every angle in the mirror
Doctor, if being a bitch is healthy, then I am the healthiest damn woman on the face of the earth
If we happened to be in rehearsal downstairs in my room and a neighbor padded across the lawn to rap gently on the window and ask us to please be more quiet, Natalie might simply lift up her skirt and mash her vagina against the window while extending her middle finger.
He was raised without a proper diagnosis.
It's a wonder I'm even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can't believe I haven't killed myself. But there's something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there is always one, and that everything can change when it comes.
Hope and God were buddies. Theirs was not a formal relationship steeped in ritual and tradition. It was more of a close yet casual friendship.
Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.
But my favorite band is Curbside Life, out of Chicago.
I can't tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it's something I never felt a part of. I've always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere.
I'm always prepared for the worst. I was prepared to have the book come out, sell seven copies, and have to keep working in advertising, so it was just great that it was received so well and by such a huge audience.
As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.
With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it.
There's never a false note in a Berg novel.
I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.
I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
But I can also write in crappy motel rooms, while standing in line, or sitting in the dentist's chair.
As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that's just not what happened.
I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in.
I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.
My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day.
I like, though, that people have a hunger to connect with other people. They're desperate to know that you're not lying to them or misleading them.
Because I've lived in one room my entire life, working at the same table that you use to pay bills at and eat at. It's going to be nice to have actual space.
Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories