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Reality was the theme of English class my junior year of high school. Organic reality versus manufactured reality versus hyperreality. Is something real because you’ve experienced it? Because it looks/feels/smells/tastes just like that other thing, the one you know is real? Is it real because the New York Times said so? Because Brietbart said so?…
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I just finished Rachel Cusk’s Outline, and I’m thinking, again, about motherhood. Or rather, the role of the mother. Or rather, roles. The roles of Outline’s narrator include: mother, ex-wife, writer. It is in that last capacity that she, an Englishwoman, has come to Athens, to spend a few weeks teaching a writing class, in…
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I go back to work this coming Monday, and no one would be more surprised than the me of three months ago to learn that I HAVE MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT IT. On the one hand, my movements and (part of?) my mind will less tethered. On the other, Per is curiouser and curiouser, as free…
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A few weeks ago, I finally made it to David Bowie Is, at the Brooklyn Museum (the first time I tried to go, the Saturday after it opened, there was a five! hour! wait! (not ideal when you’re carting around a baby)). The exhibit is a full-stop audio-visual spectacle, part documentary, part concert, part bohemian…
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I love Man Repeller‘s monthly Writers Club prompts — they’re a good exercise even when I don’t come up with anything worth sending in. Last month’s was a fan letter; I addressed mine to Shirley Jackson (whose ability to write in her head continues to amaze and inspire me). Dear Shirley Jackson, I first read the…
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[Writing love letters to my city is, it turns out, both fun and therapeutic. The first three are here; I’ll try to keep ’em coming!] It doesn’t sound particularly nice, does it: “Eastern Parkway.” Sounds like it would be wide and drab and dreary, colorless and featureless. But oh, the part of it that swings…
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When I was eight or nine and at the height of my Felicity Doll-catalyzed colonial America obsession, one of the books I read often was The Winter of the Red Snow. It was one of the Dear America books, those faux diaries that offered a child’s view on an important moment in American history. In…
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This past Friday, while walking through Cobble Hill, I watched kids in twos and fours and ones and sixes fizzing over with weekend, with bodega soda, with croissants and single baca di dama from the new espresso place whose vapors their mothers like to inhale appreciatively, decisively, this is like Milan / I remember when…,…
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Listen, if spring’s not well and truly arriving in the upper mid-Atlantic, her simulacra is pretty darn convincing. Normally, I’m a stickler for seasons starting and stopping when they ought to (said primly, like an old schoolmarm), but now that I’ve got a wee baldie in my care, I say to heck with the Gregorians,…
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I found out I was pregnant the day I got back from Portugal. As a result, the trip holds a special sort of poignancy, fine and silken and sun-bleached. While my pregnancy was its own sort of slow, that vacation was the last times in my life I was ever truly languid. It was also…
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