"I realized, as I was going through puberty (early), the necessity of shifting my focus from doing things that would impress my parents and teachers to engaging in behavior that would strike my peers as cool. I started saying 'like' constantly. I smoked pot when I was twelve. I dropped acid when I was thirteen. Losing my virginity was the next logical step."
An ode to Roy Orbison.
Fear, racism, and the historically troubling attitude of American pioneers.
"When I was younger, someone took a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me. I blamed my mother. I despised her. I loved her."
"The Colonel went out sailing. He spoke with Turk and Jew . . ."
Visiting Disney World during times of loss and sorrow.
"Here’s God’s truth about it: being a groupie wasn’t about sex, it was about access. I wanted to live in the stage life, dazzled by color and sound, constantly in motion, driven by excitement and power, loved by the stage lights, part of the story."
The pandemic of violence against women, the threats online, and the harassment on the streets are ongoing. But women’s voices assumed an unprecedented power in 2014.
A personal reconstruction.
With a brutal cancer prognosis, a woman learns to live on borrowed time.
On self-improvement, New Year’s resolutions, and Sylvia Plath.
At the age fifteen, Jenny Diski, a “foundling,” went to live with Doris Lessing. For fifty years, the two talked every week. Diski promised Lessing that she would never write about her but now, after Lessing’s death, Diski has begun to recount the story of their relationship.
The question of how to name her relationship with Lessing plagued Diski.
Lessing invited Diski into her home, but did she want her there?
College is when we first get drunk. Euripides’ The Bacchae can help us learn how to do it right.
Immune systems don’t make for clean narratives, even as we expect them to keep us pure.
To be a foreigner is to be perpetually detached, but it is also to be continually surprised.
Learning about death from a sixth-generation funeral director.
A tango dancer’s tragic accident ends her career and makes her briefly dependent on her roommate’s compassion.
An essay on PTSD.
The author’s long-running relationship with the grotesque.
“My Vassar College Faculty ID affords me free smoothies, free printing paper, paid leave, and access to one of the most beautiful libraries on Earth. It guarantees that I have really good health care and more disposable income than anyone in my Mississippi family. But way more than I want to admit, I’m wondering what price we pay for these kinds of ID’s, and what that price has to do with the extrajudicial disciplining and killing of young black human beings.”
An essay, originally published over two issues, on how and why we forget war.
“For much of my life, there was something about my mother I felt almost allergic to. As she approached death, for the first time I found I didn’t merely love her, I actually liked her.”
What do you do when you think a family member is a murderer? Step one: stop eating her food.
A grandmother tells her story.
Memories of life as a freshman cheerleader.
Previously: Jeanne Marie Laskas goes behind the scenes with the Cincinnati Ben-Gal cheerleaders.
