Many thanks to everyone who has sent concerned emails asking where I am and whether I'm all right. I am indeed all right, though exhausted, and my disappearance had to do with my school's annual all-school trip. This trip is an elaborately educational experience, intended to be a form of applied group study rather than a collective occasion for tourism or relaxation. The trip has been a school tradition for more than fifty years, and has in the past included such places as Philadelphia; Quebec; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and Cuba. This year, we travelled to Puerto Rico, where we broke into focus groups to study issues as varied as the island's economy, its vexed commonwealth status, its ecology, its history, and its artistic traditions. My desire to keep the details of my professional life off this blog prevent me from saying more; suffice it to say that it ain't easy to herd 80 kids there and back again and that the fatigue of doing so has caught up with me (as it has with everyone in the school, kids included).

But spring break begins today--eight inches of new-fallen, still-falling snow notwithstanding--and with that will come time to rest, to remember basic things like what day of the week it is and what I did yesterday, and to catch up on essentials such as sleeping, exercising, reading, and, of course, blogging.

I did manage to read a corker of a novel during my many hours on buses and planes: Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. This is the story of a mother's attempt to make sense of her son's decision to commit mass murder in his high school's gymnasium; told through a series of letters to the narrator's absent husband, the novel explores not only the intensely topical question of how a killer is made (or, more precisely, of whether killers are made or born), but the far less speakable, far more broadly applicable question of what it means when a mother simply does not and cannot like or love her child. Well worth a slow, careful read.

Take care of yourself, Erin! That kind of work really takes it out of you...

I absolutely LOVED "We Need to Talk About Kevin." The intellectual questions are compelling, but that voice Shriver comes up with for Eva is absolutely spectacular.

Your next must-read is Ishiguro's "Never Let Me go"--it's amazing--and it's also set in a boarding school--how can you resist?!?

Glad you are ok, Erin. I was a tiny bit concerned by the long silence, I must admit. Sounds like a fun trip, though.

So good to read your ideas and opinions again. Now if Brian will start publishing again,(I've missed him too.)but that's a very different story.

Erin, as the mom of a teen, and a former boarding school teen -- you are a heroine. Really. If you haven't been an "away from home kid wrangler" you don't know the deal.

I could not commit myself to Shriver's book, although it was engrossing. I was too horrified by the events in the book.

Rest up now, y'hear.

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