I’ve mostly gotten used to it but there’s still a mental mountain to climb
Memorial Day should be a day of somber remembrance, but for many Americans it’s really a drinking holiday, one of many dotted throughout the calendar year. They hit a little different for sober people.
Over the past few years, I’ve gotten used to spending holidays clutching a seltzer, but I…
More mindf*cks of motherhood
For a few weeks, one of my best friends is staying with us. She flew here from the east coast with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and after a year of semi-isolation, their energy in the house feels like a gift. They’re sleeping in my daughter’s room and my daughter is sleeping…
“I loved your book but my mom didn’t”
A memoir is not actually an invitation for people to judge the events of your life — it’s a work of literature and memory. But readers don’t always see it that way. They often take reading one as an opportunity to evaluate the author’s life decisions, especially if that person…
A tale of two celebrity Instagrams
I don’t often find myself on celebrity Instagram. It’s a bad neighborhood I try to stay away from — I don’t feel safe there. But this weekend I was visiting my 98-year-old grandmother and found myself anxiously scrolling a lot. Maybe it was the stark confrontation with mortality, something I’m…
There is rage, yes, but also endless disappointment
Before I even got out of bed this morning, I read this long piece in Slate about Blake Bailey, the author of the recent Philip Roth biography whose publication has been frozen amid allegations of rape and sexual assault, as well as grooming young students. I can’t stop reading about…
Yes, motherhood can be a private cataclysm, but I know you’ll be okay
I tried to get you a gift today but everything was too stupid. I wanted to buy you something that would embarrass you and playfully tie you to the motherhood-industrial complex — an association I know you dread — while also conveying the unwieldy tenderness I already feel toward your…
Lived Through This
It took healthy love to appreciate the abuse I had excused
“Just a heads up, I might write about our relationship,” I recently said to my boyfriend. “But I promise I won’t do it without your permission.”
“Consent,” he said.
“What?”
“Without my consent,” he repeated. “You don’t need my permission to do anything.”
“Oh. Right,” I said, laughing a little…
A conversation about growing up in an alcoholic home with Andrea Ashley, host of the Adult Child podcast
Addiction is a family disease. That’s a line you’ve surely heard if someone in your life suffers from substance use disorder. In my experience it’s true. The chemically dependent person may be the primary symptom bearer, but the entire family system becomes sick and everything becomes organized — in many…
Past Is Prologue
The term went mainstream in the ’80s and ’90s, and it’s carried a stigma ever since
By the time I attended my first Al-Anon meetings as a teenager in the ’90s, I had heard the word “codependency” many times. Where? No one in my house talked about it, nor did friends, but it was ambient in the culture at the time. …
And why ‘The Love Story of the Century’ is one of the best I’ve read
This week, I picked up a book that has languished in my towering to-be-read stack for a year. It’s called The Love Story of the Century and it was written in 1978 by Finnish-Swedish author Märta Tikkanen, translated by Stina Katchadourian, and republished in 2020 by Deep Vellum. …
