Contributions by Melissa Phipps
Melissa Phipps is a writer and City Parks/anti-golf activist. She graduated from Barnard and Columbia’s MFA program and has had stories published in New Letters, Arkansas Review, and Prairie Schooner. At the moment she is finishing her as yet unnamed memoir. She has had a long romance with South American writers including Neruda and Clarice Lispector, but it is the collected short stories of Marquez that she uses as a shield against Thanksgiving dinners and other disagreeable situations. She lives in New Orleans, that unwitting twin of Buenos Aires, a hallucination of a city translated into Criollo by Borges.
What You Tell Me, I Know
Melissa Phipps
When, at age twenty-five, my agoraphobia struck again, my favorite cousin Marie recommended that I see Dr. Schwartz. Dr. Schwartz was purportedly the Lourdes of psychiatry. He had cured artists, celebrities and billionaires. A famous writer had written his best book after a year with him. An actress had played her best role.
Dr. Schwartz’s office was on the basement floor of his oyster white townhouse on the Upper East Side. Iron bars covered the grimy window in the waiting room dooming it to perpetual twilight. In the corner, a dark screen concealed a wooden chair. Patients who didn’t wish to be seen could sit there. I assumed they were the richest or most famous of Dr. Schwartz’s practice and that it would be preposterous to hide there, yet I got embarrassed if I encountered a … Read More »
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