In a Publishers Weekly interview with Claire Messud about her novel The Woman Upstairs, which features a rather unlikable protagonist, Nora, who is bitter, bereft, and downright angry about what her l...
In the self-defense class, our teacher taught us that if we couldn't imagine doing something- cracking an assailant in the head with a stapler, opening up a can of pepper spray on an attacker, digging...
It has been suggested, more than once, that if you don’t believe in trigger warnings, you aren’t respecting the experiences of rape and abuse survivors. It has been suggested, more than once, that tri...
It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth. Clearly, this lie is damn convincing because the weight-loss industry thrives. Women continue to try to bend themselves to societal will. Women...
It is bittersweet that something is better than nothing, even if the something we have is hardly anything at all.
It took me a long time, but I prefer victim to survivor now. I don’t want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don’t want to pretend I’m on some triumphant, uplifting journey. I don’t want to p...
Let me be clear: Team Peeta. I cannot fathom how one could be on any other team. Gale? I can barely acknowledge him. Peeta, on the other hand, is everything. He frosts things and bakes bread and is un...
Look at white men when they are accused of having privilege. They tend to be immediately defensive (and, at times, understandably so). They say, It’s not my fault I am a white man, or I’m [insert othe...
Messud, for her part, had a sharp response for her interviewer. For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with M...
Milly is not, in fact, ugly, but she might as well be. She has a pretty face, which is the same thing as ugly when a woman is fat. In the complex calculus between men and women, Milly understands that...
On bad days, though, I forget how to separate my personality, the heart of who I am, from my body. I forget how to shield myself from the cruelties of the world.
One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I've struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I'm weird, because I live in m...
One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do is accept and acknowledge my privilege. It’s an ongoing project.
Perhaps we expect gay public figures and other prominent queer people to come out, to stand and be counted, so they can do the work we’re unwilling to do to change the world, to carry the burdens we a...
Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don't dare be so alive.
Racial profiling is nothing more than a delusion born of our belief that we can profile danger. We want to believe we can predict who will do the next terrible thing. We want to believe we can keep ou...
Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have a...
Smoking felt good and always gave me a light buzz. Smoking also made me feel cool when I knew I was very, very uncool.
Some serious Scrabble players are poor losers. I am a good loser. I love Scrabble so much I don’t care if I lose. I also have to be a good loser because I lose a lot, so practicality plays a role.
Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special women’s fiction designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some ma...
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