Mary Novaria

This piece is revised from an earlier version written upon Neil Armstrong's death. When Neil Armstrong died on August 25, 2012, I wondered if maybe, beyond the moon and well into the heavens, my dad had already given Armstrong a handshake or a friendly pat on the back. I turned ten the summer of 1969 that the American astronaut took that giant leap for mankind, which, being young and a child of JFK's  New Frontier, seemed a perfectly natural event. We were vacationing in the New England seaport town where my mom grew up--catching up with cousins, body surfing at Hampton Beach, and squealing with both horror and delight through visits to the lobster pound. The banded claws didn't convince us that the creatures wouldn't break through the brown paper bags on the floor in the back of the car, crawl up onto the seat, pinch our sunburned skin and never let go. One thing I'd really looked forward to on that trip was seeing my Red Sox game at Fenway Park--Carl Ya...

“My friends all tell me I should write a book,” she said, “because I’ve had so many experiences. But I’m really not interested in doing that.” “What I've found,” I told the person I’d just met, “is you kind of have to feel compelled to write. If you’re a writer, you can’t not write.”  Please pardon the double negative. “I don’t understand why people put their personal lives out there. Why do you feel like you want to do that?” “Because I want people to know they’re not alone,” I said. “So if they’re going through something, they’ll know they’re not the only one. “Hmmm. Really? I don’t read things like that.” Sigh. Thankfully, not everyone feels that way, as judged by the likes of popular self-disclosers like David Sedaris, Joan Didion, Augusten Burroughs, Mary Karr, Anne Lamott, Cheryl Strayed, Dani Shapiro and, very recently, Tara Westover, whose memoir Educated was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, to name a few. These au...