Brecken HancockTag

Few Permanent Wounds

By far the great majority of the people who go through even the severest depression survive it, and live ever afterward at least as happily as their unaffilicted counterparts. Save for the awfulness of ...

Invisible Damage

I’m an addict. There’s no way to know what I will do. Most of the time I don’t know what to expect from myself. I have lots of evidence that proves this.   While drinking, in the morning, on ...

Still Illegitimate

In this first-person novel I’m working on now, I told myself I wouldn’t write about clothes, I wouldn’t write about vanity, I wouldn’t write about depression, and I wouldn’t write about feminism, ...

Trash

 I have entered middle age.   I am overweight, and I live with a little dog and two cats. I have been alone for more than seven years.   I keep a journal, as Jenny Craig suggests, about what I eat ...

Craving a Talent Not My Own

Those who work in London are all either going down with flu, recovering from flu or in the grip of flu—even though most of the people going down with flu, recovering from flu or in the grip of flu don’t ...

Grounds for Communion

  People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the conditions tellingly described as “dwelling ...

Modest Portraits of My Mother

So perhaps my mother doesn’t need to be my queen; simply being my mother is already a lot, even if the rare kisses I place on her cheeks aren’t so majestic.  —Kim Thúy, Ru**As a statue:Bootprints ...

A Story That No One Owns

I’m sure my point is only too plain… Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction,” and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief,” I think…. ...

His Gravity

We shun those who bear the mark of death, and this is a form of baseness to which even I succumbed. Quite deliberately, out of a base instinct for self-preservation, I shunned my friend in the last months ...

Tending Toward Liquid

Habit makes time relative for us. At twenty, the faces surrounding us have no history except in the present of the gaze we turn toward them. So, young adults, old people, and children seem forever framed ...