Author: Jeannine Ouellette

My 12-year-old daughter has come down with something. I think it’s called puberty. It’s certainly called annoying. This brilliant, gorgeous child who only weeks ago was full of hugs and kisses and admiration for me has suddenly been replaced by an alien beast. “Mom?” she says with that tone. “Are you wearing eyeliner? Because you…

Here’s my favorite line from First Comes Love—Marion Winik’s horrific yet touching memoir of marriage to an openly gay man who, between being diagnosed with AIDS and his eventual death several years later, stops working and starts skimming cash from Marion in order to support his drug habit: “There was a letter from the bank…

Louise Erdrich is fighting sleep. This explains a lot. It’s said that the threshold between sleeping and waking—the lucid yet lawless terrain of twilight—is a cracked door to enlightenment, a conduit to the divine. How apropos that, here in the grainy borderlands of consciousness, the Minneapolis novelist puts pen to paper and struggles (yes, struggles)…

Life is weirder than I thought. Take, for example, my new polyfiber leopard-skin car seat covers—a gift from my teenage almost-step-daughter, Britta, and her boyfriend, Ben. They thought themselves pretty clever with this bit of cheer (although they did very considerately leave behind the gift receipt “just in case,” ha, ha). But I’m not one…

How did I get so slovenly? Can I blame it on my upbringing, fraught with stringent housekeeping rules and rigorous cleaning chores from an early age? Is it the necessary byproduct of a creative temperament? Or am I just lazy? I leave my dishes in the sink, on the table, or worse yet, in the…

A few weeks ago, more than 150 friends gathered to honor Kalid Al-Bakri’s life. They remembered him as a kind and good man, gunned down by robbers as he filled in for his brother at a South St. Paul convenience store. Then they lowered him—in accordance with the rules of his faith—into the ground at…