As a teenager, I met a stranger who changed the course of my life. Twenty years later, I went looking for him.
adolescence
Posted inEditor's Pick
Tender, Yet Creepy
“Dolls help children create wonderfully vivid and imaginative worlds, while also serving as unsettling reminders of the abyss.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Foreign Language That Changed My Teenage Son’s Life
“I worried about his ability to fit in. But then he fell in love with Russian — and on a trip to Central Asia, he flourished.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
I Loved “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Before I Loved Myself
“With each rewatch, I got further from the me I was in high school and closer to my truest self.”
Posted inFeature
Age, Sex, Location
Chatrooms taught me everything I needed to know about what real people were like before I had to grow up and become one of them.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Constraints: A Hometown Ode
“When I was in high school, ambition meant two things: escaping my hometown and becoming a writer.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Dad and Kurt Cobain
This excerpt from Hua Hsu’s memoir offers a glimpse into his parents’ generation of immigrants from Taiwan to America, and the faxes they sent to each other about homework, zines, and Nirvana. My parents had fond memories of listening to the station when they were teen-agers, back when it was Armed Forces Radio. In time, […]
Posted inUncategorized
Final Girl, Terrible Place
I was expecting a handy theory. What I found was a way of seeing that would help me decode a script I’d been stuck in for much of my life.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Story
Families Like Ours: A Reading List for the Children of Queer Parents
Some of us got to stay with our moms or dads. Others did not.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Keep This to Yourself
“I am carried, cared for, not yet touched by our culture’s casting of my body as other, as divergent. It is less like memory and more like myth.”