Contrast Study
“She woke up, but she woke up broken.” When Leslie Kendall Dye’s mother woke up after a massive brain bleed, she wasn’t the same mother.
A Wilderness of Waiting
Eight months pregnant on her family farm, a woman who’s lived her active life “perpetually looking forward to: to the evening, to the weekend, to the next year in a new place” learns to redefine her relationship with time and space. As she says: “I’ve always hated waiting.”
Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid
Rufi Thorpe reframes the choice between motherhood and making great art. She synthesizes the words of great women authors, their critics, and examples from her own life as a novelist, wife and mother of two young children.
The First Person on Mars
“Evghenia Is on Mars” is a plot-rich fantasy Twitter account purportedly run by a female scientist delivering dispatches from Mars in 140-character bursts. In an unlikely but thoroughly wonderful essay, Smarsh uses Evghenia’s story as a jumping-off point to interrogate her own life, and the strange parallels in both their journeys.
Lessons of Grief
Amy Butcher describes the experience of mourning a person she barely knew. An excerpt from Butcher’s memoir-in-progress:
“This is what happens now. I feel sadness about everything. I have no idea, of course, what Emily did or did not see, because of course I have no reason to mourn a woman I barely knew.
“‘It’s not like you were friends,’ someone told me once. ‘So it’s scary, sure—that proximity—but you don’t have a claim in all this sadness.’
“As if sadness is an entity one seeks desperately to call one’s own.”
On the Rails in Phnom Penh
A writer on tourism and the perils of addiction in Cambodia, as contrasted against her own daily routine in Phnom Penh:
“‘I’ve been robbed seventeen times this year,’ he’d say, eyes trained down in a sallow fury. ‘They take my phone, my money, even my shoes.’
“I didn’t go out much at night but seventeen seemed an excessive number.
”You know he doesn’t actually get robbed,’ Sammy whispered one day.
“‘What do you mean?’
“‘George told me,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘He was coming home one night and saw Paul, outta his mind on ice and God knows what else. Hollering and screaming and carrying on. And get this,’ Sammy pressed his fingertip into the plastic tabletop and leaned in. ‘He was pulling shit outta his pockets. And just throwing it’ — Sammy flicked his thick hands open — ‘everywhere. The security guards were all laughing. And then, then he took off his shoes and chucked those too.’
“Sammy threw his hands up then let them flop back down in his lap.”
