Erika Dreifus

In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, which asks us to share the best sentence(s) we’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

Her husband was going on about family and tests and prevention and the passing of time, life’s great eraser, to make way for a future that included healthy children, unafflicted children, a future that would render Jack an unfortunate memory in an otherwise perfectly wonderful life, one worth envying, I assure you.

Source: “Jew,” a story in Sara Lippmann’s forthcoming collection Doll Palace (Dock Street Press)

Okay, so here again I have to break the “rules” and comment. I haven’t made a whole lot of new “writer friends” here in New York since my move from Massachusetts seven years ago, but Sara Lippmann is one, and she’s a treasure. Not only is Sara an incredibly talented writer, but she is also an incredibly generous and gracious person. I’m so lucky to have friends like Sara in my life.

And we are all lucky that this collection is coming in a few months. I’ve pre-ordered a copy (you can, too!), but I’m also reading a digital galley to prepare for a Q&A with Sara. I am only halfway through the collection, and let me tell you, it was not easy to pick just one “best” sentence to share. I’ve read several of Sara’s stories as they’ve appeared individually, but this one I’d missed. It was published originally in Slice (as “The Stranger”) and republished in The Raleigh Quarterly (as “Jew”).