A personal essay in which Narratively deputy editor Lilly Dancyger writes about dealing with people’s mistaken assumptions about the economics of her upbringing. A high-school dropout who later worked her way through college and graduate school, Dancyger grew up poor — the daughter of a single mother who was a recovering heroin addict. In New […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
When Financial Privilege is Mistakenly Assumed
Lilly Dancyger speaks out about her humble upbringing.
Posted inNonfiction
‘Brokenness and Holiness Really Go Together’: Darcey Steinke on Menopause
Darcey Steinke says that most menopause memoirs “end with this come-to-Jesus moment of, ‘Then I accepted hormones.’ I’m not against it, but … I wanted to hear what it’s like for other women.”
Posted inNonfiction
‘People Can Become Houses’
In her debut memoir, Sarah Broom builds her “obsession” with her family home — destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina — into a story of how families decide who they are, how they got here, and how they reconstruct themselves over and over again.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘I Was Being Used in Slivers and Slices’: On Feminism at Odds With Evangelical Faith
“I wasn’t unified in my being. I wasn’t able to bring my whole self to the table,” says Cameron Dezen Hammon about her life as a worship leader for an evangelical megachurch.
Posted inReading List
“I wanted to be someone else”: A Reading List about Con Artists, Grifters, and Imposters
Jacqueline Alnes brings us eight stories about those who live to deceive.
Posted inNonfiction
We Still Don’t Know How to Navigate the Cultural Legacy of Eugenics
From abortion to immigration, a long-debunked scientific movement still casts long, confusing shadows over our most fraught debates.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘I Knew It Was Not My Correct Life, Because It Asked Me To Mute My Voice.’
Reema Zaman on deciding she would no longer live to please men, and how women’s self-esteem and self-love is a revolutionary act of dissent.
Posted inNonfiction
The Unreliable Reader
In Esmé Weijun Wang’s book of personal essays, “The Collected Schizophrenias,” it’s the reader, not the writer, who is an unreliable narrator.
Posted inFeature
Shared Breath
How does receiving a donated organ affect a person’s sense of self? Caitlin Dwyer explores the lives of organ donor recipients and their intimate relationships with donor families.
