Day 14: "Trapdoor"

Kathleen Alcott (Harper's Magazine, December 2023)

In this twenty-two-day series, we are counting down the days to publication (October 22, 2024) with a brief passage from each of the twenty-two essays included in The Best American Essays 2024. These excerpts were curated by Best American Essays Editorial Assistant Cheyenne Paterson and are presented in the order of the volume’s table of contents.

“I’ve always been bored by the prospect of ghosts—I spend my fear on what life may contain, not what death might imperfectly silence—but I do like to feel in conversation with the decades that made my life possible.”

—Kathleen Alcott, “Trapdoor,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2023.