Activity

When we were still married, my husband used to tell me it was an honor to provide for us so that I could write, so that I could run a press and champion other artists, so that I could be available for our children. He said all this helped him to find value in his work, to think of himself as a patr…

[...] He wanted, perhaps, for me to long for such letters from him, even though he was not a man who would ever write them—he wanted his desires to be the gift I was hungry for, and was furious that I was only thinking about myself, even though he was also only thinking about himself. Now, nearly…

On the night my father died, I walked back to the Pad alone under the same blood moon, but this time I didn’t watch it in the sky. I didn’t think about my father on the walk to what was now, in some sense, my home. I wanted, more than I had ever wanted anything in my life, to turn back the clock an…

Sentimentality

Synonyms: death of literature / emotional manipulation practiced by hacks and universally feared by “literary” writers / a thing glutted out by us ecstatically in emails and texts. Topics for further research: Why is it so difficult to convey love and joy yet so easy to find l…

Here is a thing you don’t know unless you, too, have left someone it nearly killed you to leave, and that is when you cleave from someone who doesn’t want to break up, you have to find a cold steel core inside yourself to stand firm; you have to become a more unfeeling version of yourself, that sam…