Karen Houppert’s writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Mother Jones, Ms., The Village Voice, City Paper, The Baltimore Sun, The Bennington Review, The Alaska Quarterly, and others. She is the author of three nonfiction books, The Curse (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), Home Fires Burning (Ballantine, 2005), and Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice (New Press, 2013). She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, teaches in the Johns Hopkins University graduate writing program, and is the editor of Baltimore City Paper.
Sometimes the rending apart of parent and child is abrupt, sometimes gradual.
Always, it is painful.
In my family, it happens with dogged, painful insistence at age thirteen. Thirteen is the beginning of the end. It was the last year I spent with my father. It is the age my son is now.
What is it about thirteen, I wonder. I study him. (More …)