For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body.
What peace it must be to know that someone is yours, no matter what - it is ordained, can never be otherwise.
You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.
Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful turn to God.
Why is this the new feminism and not what it looks like: the old objectification?
What teens have to work with, then, are two wildly divergent messages. They live in a candyland of sex…every magazine stand is a gumdrop castle of breasts, every reality show is a bootylicious Tootsie...
We shared an explosive enthusiasm that we blasted out of our bodies with alcohol. It was almost a sport. We tore through sobriety together, drink by drink, until we occupied a separate reality from th...
To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life.
There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. It’s like having a new lover—even the parts you aren’t c...
There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it.
The truth is that the new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy with nothing to back it up.Or, as Susan Brownmiller put it...
The idea that sex can be reduced to fixed components as it is in pornography—blow job, doggie style, money shot, girl-on-girl—is adolescent: first base, second base, all the way. It is ironic that we...
The counselor says that we are at the beginning of a long, uphill journey. She says, Relapse is a part of recovery. I think, You have got to be fucking kidding me.I say, Do I look like someone who's r...
People sometimes tells me that they're baffled by bisexuality. They are convinced that having sex with women is totally different from having sex with men. But it isn't. No more than having sex with a...
People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much. I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could con...
I had occasion to talk to Erica Jong, one of the most famous sex-positive feminists—one of the most interviewed people in the world, as she’s put it—on the thirtieth anniversary of her novel Fear of F...
But you can never tell with shadows. You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you’re crazy, but maybe you’re right. I
Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism—a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us.
To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet i...
That trip was like all my life, distilled: a compulsion to thrust myself toward adventure, offset by a longing to crawl into the pouch of some benevolent kangaroo who would take me bounding, protected...