Thoughts on tiny living and towing while waiting at the DMV.
Tag Archives: memoir
A Memoir is Not a Status Update
This site is more a museum of me, my posts like exhibits behind panes of glass.
On Boyhood and Writing (and Then and Now)
After watching Boyhood, I wonder if I’ve been looking at it all wrong. Perhaps there are no versions, but just me.
Notes on 2012
We met in London again in the summer, and made a journey to beautiful Cornwall. It was then that I realized this something was, in fact, a relationship. And how — despite parting ways once again, flying to opposite sides of the world, and resuming our romance on GMail, Skype, WhatsApp, and Twitter — I was the happiest I’d ever been.
That Thing I Wrote That Wasn’t True: On Facts, Memoir & John D’Agata
But something happens as time passes—as I drift further from a memory, as a fact is dislodged from the place it had once made sense. I begin to play with a fact: I pluck it out, examine it, and let it stand on its own. It is vulnerable: the context that hugged it is stripped away.
The Blog Queue: On Writing When You’re Not Ready
Yet before the window closed, I captured that moment—a long moment of 10 years—independent of a conclusion. Observations made with wide eyes; recordings of sensations I can no longer hear, smell, and touch; a journal of our collective recklessness.
An Outline of My Parallel Universes
1. My mother and father, both born in the Philippines, move to the United States and meet one another, or
2. My mother (or father) moves to the United States, but my father (or mother) does not, or
3. Both my mother and father don’t leave the Philippines, but still meet each other, or
4. My mother and father never meet one another.
A Triptych on Hieronymus Bosch, Love, and Madrid
As a whole, The Garden of Earthly Delights is cohesive: the chaos, ultimately, makes sense. The first time I looked at it, in my art history class in high school, I was perplexed—even uneasy. Since then, this painting has become a metaphor for how I put things together, as a memoirist and thinker.