When I married him, but, in the ten years since, it seemed like he’d decided that anything that went wrong in his life or anyone else’s was the liberals’ fault. Ellie considered
Instead of cash. It took me the better part of another week to register
You make the wrong choices, you make mistakes, you disappear for a decade, you marry the wrong man. You get hurt. You lose sight of who you are, or of who you want to be, and then you remember, and if...
Why would you want to spend your money to go to countries where the people are so poor that they’d do anything to come over here?
This is the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me, I said, through my tear-clogged throat. I want you to know that. But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true. In the grand, h...
The ones who nod in sympathy when their friends talked about street harassment, but whose lived experience involved more shouts of lose some weight than cat calls and leers. The
So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about...
She wished she’d spent more time teaching her girls that women should forgive themselves, showing them how to take care of themselves with kindness. The world was hard enough, would beat them up enoug...
She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp...
Is it still there? I asked, staring at his head, bent over, as he wedged the stethoscope beneath my left breast. And then, before I could stop myself, Does it sound broken?
If you want to hit someone or you want to throw something, I want you to run first. I want you to run until you can hardly lift your legs and your arms. Run until you’re exhausted, and then, if you st...
I've learned a lot this year.. I learned that things don't always turn our the way you planned, or the way you think they should. And I've learned that there are things that go wrong that don't always...
I will love myself, and my body, for what it can do- because it is strong enough to lift, to walk, to ride a bicyle up a hill, to embrace the people I love and hold them fully, and to nurture a new li...
I wanted love, the big love, the kind people wrote songs and made movies about. I wanted to be the center of some guy’s universe, the only thing he could think about. I wanted to matter that way. Hey!
I know that what had happened with my father - his insults, his criticism, the way he made me feel that I was defective and deformed - had hurt me. I'd encountered enough of those self-help articles i...
I knew that it was no fault of ours. We weren't to blame, I thought to myself. I could let it go; I could set the burden down, I could be free.Except, of course, that knowing something in your head is...
He’d been lonely, and I’d been lonely, but if we were together, we’d never have to be lonely again.
For women who do too much—which includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books—this is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come,...
Everyone has sorrow. Everyone has obligations. Everyone keeps going. You lean on the people who love you. You do the best you can and you keep going.
As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did.