An excerpt from They Said I Couldn't Have a Love Life, my memoir that is a Finalist for the AWP's Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction.
On October 13, 1967, soon after I arrived in Oxford, I pulled a red tweed miniskirt up over my trendy patterned stockings that covered the scales on my shapely legs, left my room and strode out into the ancient English city. Just twenty-two, I’d come to the university to study for an MA, a next step in the academic career my parents and I envisioned for me, believing I’d have to make my way in the world in the strength of my brains and Irish-American charm.

My hospital bed felt like a leather canoe that cradled my body like a mummy. No, not a mummy. Not a coffin. I wasn’t that sick. For a week, though, surgeons and gastroenterologists, the gut docs, had argued behind my back and more modestly, in front of my face, about how to cure the riveting pain in my bowels. The surgeons, I joked to friends who came to see me, were sharpening their knives.

Sitting at the end of the library table, I bend into my yellow pad, covering the photo with my left arm. If I can keep her hidden, I can just push my pen across the lined paper, copying out clinical details from the April 1955 Archives of Dermatology, noting the page numbers so I can cite the quotation correctly. Anything but look again at that terrifying picture and consider what it means to me.

The checkout lady’s panic surged as she held the coins six inches above my hand and dropped them into my palm. They clanged until I made a fist. She ran her fingernails through her hair.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, her voice rising to a higher pitch. I slid the money into a jeans pocket and stroked my thigh to calm down.

“Just dry skin,” I murmured. That wasn’t true. 

Brilliant, burning sand stung the open fissures in my heels the instant I stepped onto the beach. We children went shoeless everywhere that summer. No seven year old—certainly not one in a yellow checkered bathing suit—would wear sneakers in July. The heat spread itself across acres of dry sand in front of me. I closed my eyes, imagining a hole going down into the cool earth. Almost to China, I thought, trying to forget my smarting feet. If you dig far enough, you get from New Jersey to the other side of the world. As my face started to flush, I began to pick up speed, trotting on the balls of my feet, then sprinting, determined to get off the sandplain.

• Wordgathering, Review of Ona Gritz' Everywhere I Look: A Memoir

• Mom Egg Review, Review of MaryAnn L. Miller's Falling Into the Diaspora

• Shining Rock, Review of J.C. Todd's Beyond Repair 

• Wordgathering, Review of Rachel Adams’ Raising Henry 

• Wordgathering, Review of Chris Gabbard's A Life Beyond Reason