Read Beth Alvarado’s new essay on LitHub!

AHP’s Beth Alvarado has a great new piece, “When Your Daughter Refuses to Be in Your Essay,” up on LitHub. Check it out!

In this particular instance, she was right. I shouldn’t have quoted her. She had told me something in confidence and I’d betrayed her. She was worried that what she’d said would hurt someone else. There was no way, since the book is out, to undo what I’d done.

She said, “I’ll bet it didn’t even occur to you.” She was right. I was just trying to get the scene down as accurately as possible. “The essay didn’t even need that quote.” She was right about that, too.

But, often, she has these pithy sayings about motherhood—while on the phone with me,for instance, she might say, I’ve got to get back to crushing my children’s souls, or when she’s exasperated by her twin boys, she’ll say, will everything with a penis please behave?