Cover Photo: Illustration by Meryl Rowin for Catapult
Illustration by Meryl Rowin for Catapult

The Summer I Became a Thief

Sometimes I thought of it as war reparations. On the outwardly civil but quietly vicious battlefield of my parents’ divorce, I had been the clear loser.

Excerpted from edited by Michele Filgate (Simon & Schuster, April 2019). Reprinted with permission.

“Would you like this top?” My mother holds out an animal-print blouse with the price tag still on. It’s something I wouldn’t be caught dead in and she likely knows it, but still she’s eager for me to take it, to receive it from her. “I just bought it,” she says, “but maybe it would be better on you.”

your

a farbissener

He has a temper.

She

He has a temper. That’s what we called it when he threw my piggy bank at me one evening, while I was doing my homework.

Who am I without my halo?

“You?”

rich

browsingwant

givinghaving given

Sari Botton is the author of the memoir in essays, And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. She is a contributing editor at Catapult, and the former Essays Editor for Longreads. She edited the bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NewYork and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. She teaches creative nonfiction at Catapult, Bay Path University and Kingston Writers' Studio. She publishes Oldster Magazine, Memoir Monday, and Adventures in Journalism.

Photo credit to Sylvie Rosokoff