How to Write a Pain Book
My manifesto and introduction to the collection of essays I am working on, The Impatient, in Lit Hub.
(Re) Print: Frock Consciousness
My love affair with Vested Gentress dresses is memorialized in the lovely (Re) Ideas journal for December 2020.
My Failed Analysis
I wrote about my torrid Freudian analysis for Psyche.
My Never-Ending Migraine: Finding Effective Treatments For Migraines Is Its Own Headache
It was somewhere between my midtown Manhattan office and the subway station on Broadway when I first noticed the pain. The left side of my head felt like it was hit by a mallet — not the kind you might use in croquet, but a wood-and-iron giant hammer Thor-type thing. The pain nearly knocked me off my feet. Suddenly, the mild summer day was stifling. My dress stuck to me; my bra itched and chafed; my sandals were rubbing my heels raw. I began to see fleeting spots that I would later learn was an aura, a signal that a headache is coming.
Weights and Dates. How I lost the losers I was dating and gained self-esteem
I spent most of my life at a weight I’d describe as medium. I was embarrassed about bathing suits — especially because I have big breasts — but not totally repulsed by myself. When I was 16, I liked wearing short skirts, even though a friend later said, gesturing toward my chest with her eyes, “No one is ever going to love you for those legs.”
Obsessed with the Dresses
I can date the obsession back to its first day, using my buyer history from Etsy and eBay: April 1, 2013. On that day I bought two 1960s dresses on Etsy: a super mod gray cotton blend dress with buttons on the collar and the skirt which the seller, Where Are They Now?, called The Majorette Dress, and a white long-sleeved polyester number called The Space Cadet dress (I will refer to the dresses by their names throughout, as the sellers on these sites treat the clothes with a kind of reverence that I admired). Unlike some stores I went to again and again, I don’t think Where Are They Now? became one of my usual haunts. I know because I have these electronic trails of all of the dresses I loved, I bought, I lost.
An American in Toronto: Everything changed just as this writer started calling the city home
First, it was a thing in China. Then it was on the move. Wash your hands. Use ammonia. Stores sold out of toilet paper, of hand sanitizer, of flour. Especially to an American like me, Canadians are great followers of rules and laws; they are good in a crisis because they do what they are told. The colonial attitude is still ingrained here. The government only has to ask once and everyone abides, so the restaurants are delivery or pickup only, the parks are closed, and most people take the six-foot rule (also called the two-metre rule, but I am never going to learn the metric system) seriously. Call Public Health if you are symptomatic. Social distancing — a phrase that sounds like something advocated by the Frankfurt School — gives us too much free time and is making us think hard about how we live now. Most of us share about it on social media, where Adorno certainly would have had an aneurysm.
Becoming the Subject: On Getting Beyond Persona into the Personal
For the past 20 years or so I was a critic—a critic with some ambition, but no desire to reveal myself separately from my thoughts. I started reviewing books as a sideline when I was in an English PhD program and then I discovered I liked my side gig better than my main one. I got more actual readers, as opposed to what I would have publishing academic papers, where nine of your friends-rivals who are also studying Gertrude Stein would read your essay (or pretend to have read it).
