Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir (Soft Skull, 2015) and Loaded: Women and Addiction (Seal Press, 2007), a collection of personal essays. She is the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (Iowa, 2012) and the forthcoming The Essay Form(s) (Columbia UP, 2023). Her essays have appeared in AGNI, Brevity, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, LitMag, Southwest Review, The Rumpus, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. A Distant Town: Stories, the winner of the 2021 Jeanne C. Leiby Chapbook, is forthcoming from The Florida Review.
The Traveler’s Inn is a motor lodge on Reserve Street in Missoula, Montana, and the tired lady behind the desk is asking me how long I plan to stay. I…
I sped up, my head down, my attention pressed toward the sidewalk. The boys stayed turned from me, hushed, and I thought for a moment that they had tired of me, that I could finally get by.