I finished David Mitchell’s novel The Bone Clocks during a long flight. In the sky, surrounded by strangers, I didn’t want to leave the world he created. So I wrote a glossary defining the acts, events, and inhabitants that make that world so compelling. If you’ve read the book, I hope it will help you…

10. 1959. Thirty years into his career as a notoriously reckless jockey, my grandpa, Ralph Neves, survives a severe brain injury, his life saved by surgery and a metal plate where a portion of his skull used to be. This is his third near-death experience. 9. 1922. Nanny—Midge to her friends—was born Jessie Magdalena MacDonnell, in Nova…

At twelve, Ralph is a tiny party writhing under the heavy hands of frustrated nuns. St. Vincent’s School for Boys in San Francisco doesn’t suit him. Most of these boys got here through a petty crime, their own or their parents. For others it was a parent’s suicide or murder. For Ralph, it was his…

Recently, I had an experience teaching–on Zoom–that troubled me. I don’t think I did a good job facilitating the dynamic of the group. Students made it clear that they didn’t all experience the class as a safe space. Safety is not my primary goal for my students. I want them to take risks, and doing…

Jessie Magdalene MacDonnellApril 13, 1922 – October 1998 The MacDonnell house is average in size for Nova Scotia. Its two stories are chopped into six tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, and sitting room—a tight fit for Daniel, Bridget, and their thirteen children. Even the cliff on which the house teeters and the jagged cove below…

Some days I wish Oprah could be President for a few weeks, just so she could lead a national book club, stealthily getting the entire population to read the same book at the same time. Today, I hope she’d begin with Brook Gladstone’s The Trouble with Reality. It’s an easy read, short and full of…

People ask me how I remember so much of my childhood? Part of the answer is that I have an obsessive memory. Some people respond to hardship and trauma by forgetting. Some doing it by remembering. Some with a confusing combination of both. Any of these responses can be therapeutic; any of them can be…

Meet Aplysia californica, the sea slug whose starring role in the history of neuroscience was a revelation when I started reading about the brain. “Aplysia californica” is the first piece I published from my memoir, The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism. The book is a portrait of an artist as a biological and social…