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...
It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man.
I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, Everybody doesn’t get everything. It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essent...
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.
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...
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...
I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids. I was not a popular little girl.
I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, Everybody doesn’t get everything.
Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn’t work.
But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the