Two memoirs, a novel, long and short films, and two poems

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My name is Howard Dully. . . . In 1960, when I was twelve years old, I was given a transorbital, or "ice pick," lobotomy.

My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some "tests." It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.

. . . I hadn't been a bad kid. I hadn't ever hurt anyone. Or had I? Was there something I had done, and forgotten—something so horrible that I deserved a lobotomy?

From My Lobotomy: A Memoir by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming (Three Rivers Press, 2007).
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Scaredycat, 2006, a 15-minute short film (and official selection at the Sundance Film Festival) which was included on the DVD Fifteenth and Taylor: Dispatches from a small apartment and packaged with the full-length film The Adults in the Room, a thoughtful documentary/drama hybrid by Andy Blubaugh.
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Pauline said, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who had a birthday."

Michael stopped pouring his cereal and looked across the table at her.

"It was January fifth," Pauline said. "The woman was twenty-three."

"Why, that's your birthday, too!" Michael's mother told her. "That's how old you turned, only yesterday!"

"And because this woman happened to be at a low point in her life," Pauline went on, "she was feeling very sensitive about her age."

Michael said, cautiously, "A low point in her life?"

From The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

I recently reread this one, along with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Celestial Navigation.
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"The Lost Strudel" (originally published in The New York Times) and "On Rapture" (originally published in O, The Oprah Magazine) from I Feel Bad About My Neck: and other thoughts on being a woman by Nora Ephron (Vintage Books, 2006).
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"Your Marriage Gets Louder as You Get Older," a poem by Amorak Huey, and "Half-hearted Apology," a poem by Nicole Koroch, from Ramshackle Review, March 2011.