When women end relationships, it seems like the emotion we most acutely feel is the guilt of having pushed it away.
Cheryl Strayed
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
On American Identity, the Election, and Family Members Who Support Trump
Nicole Chung reflects on the burden of engaging with racism and educating white people, including some in her own family.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How To Be, In Silence
The social world, for all of its fundamental gifts — love, empathy, the lessons arguing provides — obscures the whole self, allowing each of us to mute what is harder to absorb about ourselves in a din of habit and distraction. When an artist breaks through that din, which seems to grow ever louder, she […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
On Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Wild’ and the Redemption Narrative
Like Dante, then, Strayed is on a spiritual journey, beginning in damnation, bound for deliverance. That makes Wild a redemption narrative — and that, in turn, helps explain its popularity, because redemption narratives are some of the oldest, most compelling, and most ubiquitous stories we have. We enshrine nature writing in the canon — you […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
‘If You Want to Be Famous, Don’t Be a Writer’
I’m always curious about the relationship between ambition and fame. On one hand, the desire to be a famous writer can be useful—you have to have drive, ambition. You need to be balls-out doing what you’re going to do to have any hope of success. But on the other hand, so many writers conflate ambition […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Reading List: Mother’s Day
With Mother’s Day on the horizon, I chose “mothers/relationship with moms” as the theme of my list this week: * * * 1. My Mom (Mary H. K. Choi, Aeon, April 2013) A deceptively simple title belies a gorgeous, funny, sometimes dark essay in which Choi attempts to communicate her strange affection for her mother. 2. The Love […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Reading List: Mother’s Day
With Mother’s Day on the horizon, I chose “mothers/relationship with moms” as the theme of my list this week: * * * 1. My Mom (Mary H. K. Choi, Aeon, April 2013) A deceptively simple title belies a gorgeous, funny, sometimes dark essay in which Choi attempts to communicate her strange affection for her mother. 2. The Love […]
Posted inUncategorized
Four advice columnists, Dear Sugar’s Cheryl Strayed, Salon’s Cary Tennis, Slate’s Emily Yoffe, and The Globe and Mail’s Lynn Coady, discuss what it’s like to give advice to people online: Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in […]
Posted inUncategorized
‘More Will Be Revealed’: Advice to a Grieving Father
Cheryl Strayed’s collection of advice pieces, ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’, is one of our favorite collections.