I just read a new novel, Freud’s Mistress, by Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman. The story is based on speculation that has intrigued historians and biographers for more than 70 years that Sigmund Freud had an affair with his wife’s brilliant and beautiful sister, Mina Bernays, who lived with the Freud family in Vienna for more than 40 years. Freud’s wife and mother of their six children reportedly knew about the affair but kept quiet...

Among my earliest memories is one of my mother’s body hugely pregnant with my twin brothers. I was three and a half, seated on the green bathroom rug with my favorite wooden blocks etched with farm animal shapes: a yellow cow, blue pig and red lamb. My mother had placed me there while she showered. I looked up at her as she stepped out of the tub, taking her in from my knee-high vista. The long angles her tan arms and legs formed with her torso; the curve of her pregnant belly; the soft swell of her breasts tipped by deep-rose cylindrical nipples and her thick, black triangle of pubic hair.

Once Upon A Time are words of initiation we learn at a very young age. The four words, which initiate us into the world of story, are among our first invitations to open our imaginations and let words and images carry us to faraway lands, imaginary spaces, to new landscapes of promise and potential. Through these early stories, we begin to form who and what we become in the world...