Weeks from becoming an Army Ranger, the author’s cousin took part in a clumsy bank robbery with fellow soldiers. Nancy Rommelmann reviews ‘Ranger Games’ by Ben Blum for the Wall Street Journal

"I loved Tim deeply when we were a couple, but our day-to-day lives had been a wreck."

The Monstrousness of Empathy was an instance where it seemed as though writing about the murder of a young girl was not unlike "barging into the room of a patient who had suffered third-degree burns, moving close to the bed despite knowing my touch, even one breath, might infect him... What was I doing here?"

Over on Playboy.com, one of my favorite humans of recent meeting, Remy Bennett, talks "Serial" and "Making a Murderer" and the ethics surrounding our current obsession with true crime as entertainment. She also gives "Destination Gacy" a little love. I was struck by the parallels between the death-row groupies I met while visiting Gacy, and the women Remy saw at this year's CrimeCon. One difference: the woman who told me which vending machine snacks Gacy liked was wearing a completely sheer mesh top. 

The case was closed, but for journalist Nancy Rommelmann, the mystery remained: What made a mother want to murder her own children?

More from the story that never ends, a clip on YouTube, of my describing my first meeting with Speedie/Laura Albert/JT LeRoy, for Marjorie Sturm's wonderful documentary, The Cult of JT LeRoy...

Back in 1990, after I’d had a baby and before I’d given up illusions of being an actress, I accepted my then-neighbor’s offer of commercial representation. This, despite her saying she couldn’t see me selling anything except “maybe spaghetti sauce”...

A friend and I once played a game around the pool at her apartment in Los Feliz, a game that we called How the Celebrity Died Badly. It involved inventing gruesome deaths for the famous. I can’t recall even one scenario, only that we laughed over a game that was cruel and made us feel clever.

It was also cynical, putting as it did a door between the cynic and what’s going on. Sure you can see through a keyhole, but how much?

This seemed a lesson I needed to continually relearn...

“I think of it every day; I never go over that bridge without thinking about it,” says Pati Gallagher. Her residence is as close as any in Portland to the Sellwood Bridge, her patio a three good strides from the river, and where she was sitting when she heard the children hit the water...

Reading from TO THE BRIDGE, to be published June 2018 by Little A Books

Reading from TO THE BRIDGE, to be published June 2018 by Little A Books

Reading the first chapter of TO THE BRIDGE, to be published June 2018 by Little A Books

Dear Michael –

I write to you this morning via someone you knew when you were a very little boy. I do not expect you remember her, though perhaps you remember more from that time than most three year-olds. Habit can create memory, and you had little of that, but so can trauma. Perhaps people told you about the fire and it’s become part of your history, though that would require people to pass along history, and the people you knew then I don’t imagine were around very long...

On the night she died, my mom drove to a motel to buy cocaine with two men.”

This is the first sentence of Leah Carroll’s memoir, “Down City.” The paragraph ends with one of the men telling her mother, whom he is choking with a towel, “Come on you rat. Give me the death rattle...”

Fox tells me she will be receiving the Hadada Award from the Paris Review on April 6, that she is “the eighth writer to get it,” others include Norman Mailer, Williams Styron, Philip Roth, John Berryman and Joan Didion. I ask her how this feels.

“It feels good,” she says, to be recognized. “But it’s only for a short time. Time swallows us all.”

I will be on a panel this Saturday, February 11 at 9am, with four other authors who write about violence: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich ("The Fact of a Body"), Chinelo Okparanta ("Happiness, Like Water"), R.O. Kwon ("Heroics") and Robin Wasserman ("Girls on Fire"). Do stop in if you're at AWP 2017 or in DC.

My review of Douglas Preston's new book, in today's Wall Street Journal. I suspect other reviews may liken the true adventure to Indiana Jones. I did not, but there are man-size snakes spitting venom, a forest floor "carpeted with glistening cockroaches" and a parasitic disease that will eat through your face. Check it out!  

Very nice work by Vogue.com on the standoff at Standing Rock. My daughter Tafv Sampson was there last week, bringing in supplies, shooting photos, and working with the Vogue crew. (If you don't blink you will see her in the video). Hoka hey, protectors. 

Sometimes you don't know why you are offered an assignment, as was the case when someone from A & E contacted me to see whether I wanted to interview the filmmakers of the docuseries The Killing Season. Something told me, I did want to. 

I am very happy with where the book will be published. The announcement, from Publisher's Weekly: