Narratives about certain experiences are somehow legitimized when mediated through a man’s perspective. Consider the work of John Updike or Richard Yates. Most of their fiction is grounded in domestic...
My sad stories will always be there. I am going to keep telling them even though I hate having the stories to tell. These sad stories will always weigh on me, though that burden lessens the more I rea...
Movies, more often than not, tell the stories of men as if men’s stories are the only stories that matter. When women are involved, they are sidekicks, the romantic interests, the afterthoughts. Rarel...
Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning. This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone. We all have history. Yo...
Kindness bridges many differences too, and so does a love of One Tree Hill or Lost or beautiful books or terrible movies.
It's okay if most of your friends are guys, but if you champion this as a commentary on the nature of female friendships, soul search a little.
It is often women who pay the price for what men want.
In literature, as in life, the rules are all too often different for girls. There are many instances in which an unlikable man is billed as an antihero, earning a special term to explain those ways in...
In all seriousness, Scrabble was invented by a man named Alfred Mosher Butts.
If your man or woman is a scrub, just own it so you and your friends can talk about more interesting things. My go-to explanation is I am dating an asshole because I’m lazy.
I went back to school, and my classmates admired my new body, offered me compliments, wanted to hang out with me. That was the first time I realized that weight loss, thinness really, was social curre...
I wanted to feel like he and I belonged to each other, but each time we were together and then after, I felt quite the opposite. And still, I was drawn to him.
I wanted him to fill the loneliness, to ease the ache of being awkward, of being the girl always on the outside looking in.
I realized that weight loss, thinness really, was social currency.
I knew I was in love with The Hunger Games when I did not want to get off the treadmill
I excused myself and ran to the restroom, where in the privacy of my stall, I whispered, I beat you, I beat you, I beat you. There was fist pumping.
Every Friday afternoon Brad invites me to join him and his frat buddies for a game of basketball at the Y. Every Friday I remind Brad I don’t know how to play basketball. This confuses him. Someday I’...
So much testimony is demanded of women, and still, there are those who doubt our stories.
Also understood that I wasn’t being intentionally mean. I was being honest (admittedly, without tact), and I was being human. It is either a blessing or a curse that those are rarely likable qualities...
When you succeed early at an endeavor, you convince yourself you will easily replicate that success. Ask child actors.