Laurie Stone at the Morton Street Pier in New York City, c. 1970. Photo courtesy of author. Yesterday, I received a check for the security deposit on my apartment in New York City. It’s done. I lived there for forty-three years. I have visions of the open road, except we can’t go anywhere. In unpacking from the move, I found notebooks I wrote in the 1970s. The particulars of my life are news to me—who
The original 2001 “Rockin’ Road Map,” a guide for campers, volunteers, and parents, created by Misty McElroy. BETWEEN COVID AND kids, parties had fallen off my must-do list. It was an exotic feat that I, en famille, managed to travel across town this past Christmas Eve to a Hanukkah party where, noshing on smoked fish and sugar cookies, I learned that the original Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls was kaput. I was shocked. Misty
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:
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
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