Locked

 In October 2021, the culture site Lit Hub published a cheeky advice column by Walker Caplan. To help readers define “autofiction,” the piece offers ten grounding principles for whether a work falls under its purview. They range from “autofiction is when a character lives in New York” to “when you write about something bad you’ve done, that’s autofiction. When you write about something bad done to you, that’s memoir.” Albeit satirical, the list elucidates enduring

Naudline Pierre, ‘Too Much, Not Enough,’ 2019 2020. Oil on canvas, 60 × 40 in. For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be a girl. Even before I knew what it meant to be a girl, what a girl even was, I wanted it. I wanted to be pretty and to be adored in the way that only femmes could be adored. When you see a beautiful femme, it feels like getting

A still from Thelma & Louise (1991), the first road trip movie with women at the wheel. In the summer of 2021, in those halcyon months between vaccination and the Delta wave, I drove from New York to Los Angeles with my friend Julie. I had barely driven since high school, had never driven west, had taken only short road trips with boyfriends who never let me drive. Like everyone else in the world, Julie

October 2021 The sun is out, and Julie’s still in bed at noon, one, three, and still at half-past four. Another bright October day, one more spent walking, writing e-mails, solitude become habitual, there, here. My mood depends on the temperature outdoors, and if the sky is bright or going dour. I take one of two morning walks, once I’ve had mint tea. Coffee, awakening’s elixir, leaves a sour taste in my mouth now, a

After Geek Love became a best seller and earned nominations for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize, and after she had earned the admiration of early 1990s punk icons like Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Gus Van Sant, and Tim Burton, Katherine Dunn wrote for long stretches in the solitude of a large blue house in Portland, Oregon. Before that, in the 1970s, Dunn was recently separated from her first husband and wrote

Gertrude Stein is one of the biggest, boldest, baddest, most audacious of all modern cultural figures. Born in Pittsburgh in 1874, she died in 1946 while undergoing an operation for stomach cancer in the American Hospital in Paris. I began to study her almost by accident fifty years ago—I was spending a year at Yale on a postdoctoral fellowship, and the Stein papers were in the Beinecke Rare Book Library there. As I sat with