Death Cleaning and Me
I’m not Swedish, not even remotely Scandinavian. But these days any title with death in it attracts my interest. As Margareta Magnusson, who says she is somewhere between 80 and 100, puts it in the...
View ArticleLady Catherine de Bourgh Tells You How To Pack For Your Summer Vacation
So. I have some thoughts about your packing. Your gowns are not well packed. I have been looking them over, and they are not well packed. What were you thinking? You have just sort of – done what...
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The Displaced Detective
Over a year after I first read The Moonstone, it’s not the famously twisty plot that stands out to me. And it’s not how Wilkie Collin’s 1868 novel does what it’s often praised for doing — setting the...
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Advanced Pain Studies
I read Lisa Olstein’s Pain Studies straight through a headache day. Her account of chronic migraine is unexpectedly bright and punchy. It forgoes ponderous phenomenology; it forgoes arguing for her...
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A Novel for the Plague Years
When the Spanish Influenza comes on stage in William Maxwell’s 1937 novel They Came Like Swallows, the family at the heart of the book pays it little attention. The reader knows, however, that this is...
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Moby Dick and Breastfeeding
Moby Dick, that magnum opus of American literature, famously contains no women. (They are in the background but not part of the action). But it does have breastfeeding. Mother whales nurse their...
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Jane Austen Was Not Fucking Around about Home School
This fall, white America is in the throes of (yet another, but hopefully broader) awakening to its own history and present of white supremacist violence, and my white kids are home and mine to educate,...
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The Prescience of Octavia Butler’s Kindred
Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, acknowledgments of Octavia E. Butler’s prescience have become more routine. With its stark picture of citizens desperate for water and safety, her 1993 novel...
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Reading With Sam See
“To accept the ways in which one is lost is to be found and not found.” — Muñoz, Cruising 73. “I’m building the / archive of a life that shouldn’t exist, while it still does” — (Pico, Junk, 72). A...
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Charlotte Brontë’s OCD
The year I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder was the same year I discovered Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Villette. Lucy’s story is, like mine, one of a young woman who moves away from home...
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In Praise of Dog Books
Last March, when the world went into quarantine, I began losing weight and reading about dogs. My partner, meanwhile, made sourdough, Caesar salad, and matzah ball soup. I was too busy to eat, though,...
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Laterally Cool
I’d neither heard nor heard of Crystal Gayle’s 1977 Grammy Award-winning hit “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” until the second time I read Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers. I was...
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How Reading Queer Authors Improved My Relationships
In 16 years of teaching literature, I cannot think of a line that hit me harder than Celie’s declaration about Shug, the love of her life: “Just cause I love her don’t take away none of her rights.”...
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Notes On Passing
Rebecca Hall’s film Passing (Netflix) is a passion project, born of many people’s commitment to Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name. We share this attachment to Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance...
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Kinds of Blue: Notes on the Avonlea Village Improvement Society and Teen...
Have you ever seen a color so “mortifying,” such a “burning shame,” that it prompts “blank dismay,” provokes angry tears and “bitterness of spirit,” galvanizes a community to outrage and “public...
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