I was maybe fourteen when my cousin Tom and a friend rode their motorcycles from their home in New Jersey to Florida. They spent the night with us at our house in Yorktown, Virginia. I can still picture the bikes. Choppers. Front wheels stretched way out on long forks. Ape hanger handlebars. They were the coolest motorcycles I had ever seen in real life. And my cousin was riding one of them on what felt like an endless road trip. Decades later, after owning several motorcycles myself, I...

On memory and the narratives that shape our lives For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing a novel with the working title Begin Again. But recently, I’ve started questioning what I call it. In What If the Truth Was Never the Point?, I wrote about how the novel itself seemed to be changing as I moved deeper into the second draft. Or perhaps more accurately, my understanding of it was changing. That’s the strange thing about stories. We tend to think we are shaping them, when often they...

A handwritten note from his young daughter slips out of an old passport after years of business travel, leading one father to reflect on emotional inheritance, fathers and sons, and the language of love men are often never taught to speak.