this photo of joan in 1955 🥺❤️

…my earliest picture of myself being “married” was myself getting a divorce, leaving a courthouse in a South American city wearing dark glasses and getting my picture taken.

So I had encouraged her to go to a summer program there in high school, which she had loved, everybody wore leotards and smoked cigarettes and read Sartre, what high school girl wouldn’t love it.

There is nothing to fix in what you can't forget.

It is hard to remember that when you are young and have lived only a few years in a place, but the truth is that the places where you were happiest are not always the places where you belong.

Presence is not a given; it is made and remade, a construction you wear like a coat, sometimes perfectly fitting, sometimes awkward and heavy, but always your own.

We put “Lay Lady Lay” on the record player, and “Suzanne.”

I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town.

The Doors were different, The Doors interested me.

There in the Governor's Mansion that night I learned for the first time that my face to the world was not necessarily the face in my mirror.

What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace.

...the sunlight falling through the big windows, the man picking up his drink and beginning again and telling me, without ever saying a word, something I had not known before about bad marriages and wasted time and looking backward.

I had no further business in this room and yet I wanted to stay the day.

I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile. I want it still.

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true.

It is just as hot in the summertime, so hot that the air shimmers and the grass bleaches white and the blinds stay drawn all day, so hot that August comes on not like a month but like an affliction…

All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more.