When I was twelve years old, in 1969, my family moved to Reston, Virginia. It was a planned community near Washington, D.C.—a suburban utopia where C.I.A. agents and Foreign Service officers like my father could raise their families. I hated Reston, and hated living in the United States. We had stayed in Northern Virginia for part of the previous year, between stints in Taiwan and Indonesia. During our time there, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated—one of the few times I saw my parents cry. While I was out selling “I Have a Dream” stickers in King’s memory to support the Poor People’s Campaign, a neighbor sicced his dogs on me.
I ran away from home several times, and so my mother and father devised a solution for my restlessness: they sent me to stay for a year with an aunt and uncle in Liberia. I spent most of it ducking my chaperons to travel into the Liberian wilderness and around East Africa, and when the time was up I told my parents that I didn’t want to leave. I noted that a Swiss adventurer had passed through Monrovia on his way to crossing the Sahara by camel and had invited me to join him. My parents pointed out that I hadn’t yet finished middle school. Crestfallen, I went back home.
I got into more trouble as I entered high school, mostly for drugs; I did acid and pot, like everyone else, but a girl once shot me up with heroin before archery class. Several kids I knew died from overdoses. After that, my parents decided to move again, and began looking for a calmer place to live. My father took early retirement from his Foreign Service job—thinking, he often said later, that he needed to “save me.” But he and my mother were also trying to save their marriage, which had become increasingly strained during twenty years of moving around the world.
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GET IT TOGETHER
In the beginning was the mob, and the mob was bad. In Gibbon’s 1776 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the Roman mob makes regular appearances, usually at the instigation of a demagogue, loudly demanding to be placated with free food and entertainment (“bread and circuses”), and, though they don’t get to rule, they sometimes get to choose who will.
GAINING CONTROL
The frenemies who fought to bring contraception to this country.
REBELS WITH A CAUSE
In the new FX/Hulu series “Say Nothing,” life as an armed revolutionary during the Troubles has—at least at first—an air of glamour.
AGAINST THE CURRENT
\"Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!,\" at Soho Rep, and \"Gatz,\" at the Public.
METAMORPHOSIS
The director Marielle Heller explores the feral side of child rearing.
THE BIG SPIN
A district attorney's office investigates how its prosecutors picked death-penalty juries.
THIS ELECTION JUST PROVES WHAT I ALREADY BELIEVED
I hate to say I told you so, but here we are. Kamala Harris’s loss will go down in history as a catastrophe that could have easily been avoided if more people had thought whatever I happen to think.
HOLD YOUR TONGUE
Can the world's most populous country protect its languages?
A LONG WAY HOME
Ordinarily, I hate staying at someone's house, but when Hugh and I visited his friend Mary in Maine we had no other choice.
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”