Boyhood Empire

To read memoirs with any pleasure requires a leap of faith facilitated by considerable intellectual mischief. Memoirs cannot be trusted and their “song of [...]

This much I know for sure, no tricks or embroidering: I arrived in Washington, D.C. from France toward the end of 1957. At the [...]

Every six months, in another epoch, my parents would pin me gently to the scribbled wall and mark how much I’d grown of late. [...]

Just around the corner from the pencil marks were a flight of stairs that led to the second floor—in my mind, the floor above [...]

At the very front of the small house we owned in Washington, D.C. two score and some years ago, a majestic pine tree grew [...]

Go ahead. Blame it on Tom Sawyer. Why not? It couldn’t have possibly been my fault. I was, after all, only following in a [...]

If alienating the local fire department and turning my beloved cats against me wasn’t enough—and it wasn’t—I soon set higher and more elaborately mischievous [...]

When my father first announced we would be going to live in Spain, he also explained that we would be traveling via London on Qantas. [...]

When the time came, leaving London became a story about a corrupt king. But as all matters in my young life, it came to [...]

The very first thing that struck me about living in Madrid, Spain was that the newspapers were in Spanish. I did not understand Spanish, [...]

Once my Franco-American private school had rid me of my French ways — I was born in Paris and spent my first five years [...]

Even before we left for Spain, murmurings about this “thing” known as Catholicism had taken up residence in our Washington house. Less than a [...]