I was a child full of cautions, ellipses, living in an insular world, always watching. I watched the physical irritation of my father, how his eyes jerked and his mouth narrowed at the slightest interruption.
Patricia Foster
Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls: Confessions of a Southern Daughter, Just Beneath My Skin, and Girl from Soldier Creek. She has won a Pushcart Prize, a Dean's Scholar Award, the Hoepfner Award, the Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction, and other prizes. Seventeen of her essays have been Notable Essays in the Best American Essays series. She was a professor for 25 years in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa and has taught in Australia, Italy, Spain, and the Czech Republic.