In the fall of 2021, I ran into my ex-best friend at Trader Joe’s. I was surprised to see her; I had moved back to Los Angeles and she still lived on the East Coast. We’d met as undergrads at Spelman College and, while I was in graduate school, I’d lived briefly with her and her husband, but we hadn’t spoken for more than a year. I was pushing my cart through the dairy section,
That year, I asked only one question and spent a lot of time looking out my apartment’s kitchen window. The view was mostly a three-story ailanthus, its leaves orange and lavender at the end of the day. The phone rang. It was my mother. That year, I didn’t like talking to my mother, and I asked questions to avoid having to talk about myself. But really, I was only asking one question: Will I have
The generic-looking typescript (around two hundred pages of printer paper, bound with a rubber band) living in my office at Feminist Press predated me by many years. In 2015, when I excavated it from a drawer, I might have tossed it in the recycling bin but for the sticky note attached in the recognizable hand of my predecessor’s predecessor (i.e., Gloria Jacobs and Florence Howe), warning, Don’t throw away! Beneath that, centered in all caps:
Edgar Degas, Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot, c. 1910, bronze. Degas made at least four variations of this sculpture; this version, made with plasteline and cast posthumously, is most likely the one for which Pauline posed. Courtesy of Tate. IN 1899, ONE Amélie Lang, eighteen, was abducted by her friend’s brother-in-law. When her guardian (an aunt who resented responsibility for Lang’s care) found her days later in the apartment where the
Illustration by Mayra Tuncel. 1. Girls Gone Wild I saw you girls incessantly, a parade of commercials during late-night television. Seeing the text bar reading all real covering your nipples on the DVD covers always made me feel guilty, implicated in your antics, even though I was only trying to watch Comedy Central. You college girls. Say you’re on spring break, and next thing you know, Joe Francis is buying you shots and saying you
There exists a certain genre I’ve grown to love. I will describe it as “writer struggling with a historical failure.” I don’t mean that the failure itself is historic, but rather that the artist is failing to write about or depict a historical figure, most often another writer or artist. The genre includes books like Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage (the narrator struggling with a biography of D. H. Lawrence), the recent gem Doireann
AS A TWENTY-SOMETHING feminist in the early-nineties recession, I hit the job-jackpot: Ms. magazine. I’d grown up with the magazine. I’d internalized its references to back- alley abortions, men who “just don’t get it,” and workplace discrimination. The fact that nothing we published was by or about feminists of my generation or younger who’d grown up taking women’s rights for granted was, weirdly, not weird to me. One fateful editorial meeting, Barbara Findlen circulated “Your
Realizing I am a witch has been a life-long, gradual process, but if I had to choose one event to mark my entry into full witchy power, it would be the ritual I created to heal and transform after my abortion at age forty-three. At that time, my husband and I had two young children and two growing careers; we agreed bringing another life into our family would negatively impact its overall well-being. The abortion
Illustrations by Maya Tuncel The July that Woody Allen died was the July I drove off the cliff and lived. Woozy on Vicodin, I said to the nurse, “Thank god he’s finally kicked it.” The hospital TV did not show his most recent self, withered and bent as if against a constant wind, but his young, first-in-love face. When I went off the cliff I thought, This car is going to be totally totaled. I
Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco in My Brilliant Friend, season 2. Courtesy of HBO. Sometimes friendships survive because of the things we don’t say. A few weeks ago, I was walking with a fellow writer down a short trail in Bread Loaf, Vermont, when our conversation turned to our shared love for Elena Ferrante. She told me, after some hesitation, that reading the Neapolitan Novels had left her feeling almost “sick” and “injured,” that the
