Excerpted from The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary by William Shunn, available now! Two years earlier, my father and I were driving back roads somewhere east of Victorville in the California desert when he sprang a terrifying question on me. “Son,” he asked, “do you want to serve
The following story is an outtake from my memoir The Accidental Terrorist. The names of most of the other participants, including relatives, have been changed to offer some small measure of concealment. When I was eighteen, my father and I drove from northern Utah to Los Angeles for my cousin
My grandmother, Elsie Marie Rigby Partridge, passed away early Sunday morning. She was 95 years old, going on 96. She was raised in the farmlands of Idaho, where she had seven brothers and one sister, not to mention five stepbrothers and a stepsister. She had five children, three of whom
Like many writers, I have long had the habit of keeping notes about future story ideas. I was probably 17 or 18 when I had an idea for a story about man whose many siblings are one by one being picked off by an unknown assailant. The man grows increasingly
That nasty Rick Santorum is at it again. He likes to think of himself as a culture warrior, but I see him more as the kind of infectious culture that requires a good shot of penicillin. The poisonous idea he's spreading this time around is that children with
Almost exactly five years ago, I called your attention here to a brouhaha in the small town of Kanab, Utah, over the adoption by the city council of a non-binding resolution defining the family as "one man, one woman" with a "full quiver" of children. A
Today my father would have been 75 years old, had he not succumbed to complications from prostate cancer nearly three years ago. I want to post something about the old man, but the closest thing I have to a remembrance at hand is the second chapter from the latest in-progress
Between five and six this morning, I had a pretty awful dream. I was somehow in a big grungy rusty white panel van with my family, who I guess were visiting town. Except it wasn't my family as it exists now. It was my parents circa the mid-seventies
Clearing out my inbox (a task that requires a pitchfork, a shovel, and high-volume hose), I ran across an email from a old, old family friend who had known my father since they were young together in Los Angeles, and whom my siblings and I have always known as Uncle
I have no illusions of immortality Or do I? The way I shovel known poisons into my mouth Shout motherfucker at drivers who cut me off The way I still haven't put up the smoke alarms, two years later The way I keep putting off Moby-Dick Let a
My deepest thanks to everyone who posted or called or sent cards on the occasion of my father's passing. (Well, to everyone but the ones who tried to use the opportunity to reassure me of the reality of the afterlife. Bad time to make your dubious point.) The
You thought I was done with Christopher Bigelow's post, but I was only taking a little breather. After declaring that it's probably too late for him to change his ways anyway, even if he wanted a new lifestyle, he makes this judgment: And it sounds like
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