What those doctors offered was so tempting, so seductive: this notion that we could fall asleep for a few hours, and within a year of waking up, most of our problems would be solved, at least accordin...
What this debate shows us is that even in this day and age, the rights of women are not inalienable. Our rights can be and are, with alarming regularity, stripped away. I struggle to accept that my bo...
We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t Is this a potential friend for me? but Is this character alive? Perhaps,
Until that moment, Michael had not understood the vastness of the world and how small a place he held in it,
This world and its unwillingness to accept and accommodate me are the problem. But I suspect it is more likely that I can change before this culture and its attitudes toward fat people will change.
This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone.
This is fiction, and if people cannot be flawed in fiction there’s no place left for us to be human.
These sad stories will always weigh on me, though that burden lessens the more I realize who I am and what I am worth. 73 The thing is, though, loneliness, like losing control of my body, is a matter...
These pictures from the photo albums of my childhood are artifacts of a time when I was happy and whole. They are evidence that, once, I was pretty and sometimes sweet.
These are gifted adolescent women who don’t get to be judged on their impressive talent: their bodies are already paramount to the work they want to do and it’s only going to get worse. At sixteen the...
There was an incident with some boys in the woods, and suddenly, I was stuffing my face with Twinkies or ordering a pizza late at night, trying to fill this ragged, ugly thing inside me that couldn't...
There is a comfort, I suppose, to consuming violence contained in ninety-minute segments, muted by commercials for household goods and communicated to us by former television stars with feathered bang...
There are all kinds of television shows and movies about women but how many of them make women recognizable? There
The most profound of those realizations was that part of healing is taking care of your body and learning how to have a humane relationship with your body. I was broken and then I broke some more, and...
Take, for example, someone like Don Lemon. He is a black man, raised by a single mother, and now he is a successful news anchor for a major news network. His outlook seems driven by the notion that if...
Pointing out the many ways in which misogyny persists and harms women is not anger. Conceding the idea that anger is an inappropriate reaction to the injustice women face backs women into an unfair po...
One thing he had learned in this life—there were always barbarians at both sides of the gate. He
My body is treated like a public space. 62 Air travel is another kind of hell.
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...
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...