Eliz

“Don’t say a word!” my mother warned, at the start of it all.

And I didn’t, until I could.

My parents, a perpetually warring, domineering pair in their 80s — a retired Macy’s dress buyer and a dentist — begin wintering in Mexico, where they abandon their usual prudence to embrace adventure and a pair of shyster developers. Normally hypercritical, they are blithely indifferent to the disasters that ensue, leaving the mop-up to me, their permanently indentured only child.

Don’t Say a Word! : A Daughter’s Two Cents recounts our hapless, screwball struggles: theirs with old age and mine with them. The surprising ways in which my parents come undone reveal just what they’d spent their lives trying to hide, thereby setting me free.

Now available for purchase

• Barnes & Noble
• Amazon
• IndieBound
• Book Depository
• BAM!

For twenty years, I ran a small architectural firm and wrote about design, when not traveling to far-flung places with my psychiatrist husband and two rambunctious children. I decided to concentrate on writing in order to pursue the many quirky questions that fascinated and bedeviled me: Why are butterflies called butterflies? Why can’t I recall the taste of wine? Why are first-love memories so potent? More and more, I found myself examining my personal life in the light of the wider world and the wider world in the light of my life.

Don’t Say a Word!, my first book, is the result of a long struggle to answer a personal question I could not escape, and I hope it will provoke answers to questions you may have about your own life. My essays have appeared in The New York Times and The Boston Globe, on online sites such as Cognoscenti, and in essay anthologies, like Travelers’ Tales. On this site are essays related to this book, on www.archive.eLizWrites.com are essays about everything else. I currently blog at Psychology Today.