I recently stumbled across a blog entirely devoted to the sharing of secrets. The project began as a public art project in 2004, when its founder, Frank Warren, distributed 3,000 self-addressed postcards with instructions to write down and illustrate a secret and send it back. He stuck the cards in library books, left them on [...]

Sunday morning I woke to a fresh covering of snow. I tucked my 8-week-old baby, Natalie Joy, into a sling, wrapped a coat around us and headed into the January morning. The snow clung to the bare tree branches, blanketed the roof and blurred the lines between the grass and sidewalk. As I stood there [...]

REVIEW OF: Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self by Joseph E. Davis (University of Chicago Press, 312 pages, $27.50) “I was not sexually abused. Yet I was sexually abused,” Ellen Bass wrote in an anthology of survivor accounts called I Never Told Anyone. “We were all sexually abused. The images and attitudes, [...]

Each year when the Chicago winds howl against my windows, I slip into hibernation mode. I sleep more, mope more and munch more. Around December 18, my annual Christmas Cookie diet begins — each time I see a Christmas Cookie, I eat it. If I can wash it down with a thick glass of eggnog [...]

About a year ago, on NPR’s “This American Life,” I heard the story Louann Mims, a 78-year-old Hurricane Katrina survivor who floated through her flooded home for eight days on an extra firm Sterns and Foster mattress. Before the levees broke, she went out on her patio to have some cereal and a banana. After [...]