Here's half a picture of a woman on her honeymoon in Mexico. She'd been drinking an awful lot of good tequila and sleeping like she'd been hit in the head with a brick, despite the toe, broken on a concrete step her first day there.

There I was, hungover and somehow sunburnt only from the neck up, pacing myself through Mary Karr's Liar's Club. It's a terrific book, scary and comic, exactly the way I felt about being married, after having been at it for less than a week. There's a lot of drunken, blinding sunlight in the book, too, so mentally, at least, I felt right at home.

"Mother's bleach job put me in mind of an obituary picture I'd seen of Jayne Mansfield, who apparently got her head cut slap off in a car wreck. I was prone to grisly images at that time so it was no strain at all to picture Jayne Mansfield's head -- still wearing cat's-eye sunglasses with rhinestones all around the edges -- all lopped off at the neck and sailing up across the blue air like a fly ball.

Here's a poem of hers that was in a recent New Yorker. It makes me hope we can all weather a certain person's coming adolescence with good grace and snappy comebacks.