“When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain.”
childhood
Posted inEditor's Pick
Fighting the Tree
“Maybe I wasn’t the son Dad wanted. Maybe, if he could have, he would have picked another kid, a son he could enjoy parenting.”
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.”
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Featured, Nonfiction, Story
B is for Bastard
As a boy, after the trauma of learning he is not his father’s biological son, Brian Gresko finds his sense of himself is shattered.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Featured, Nonfiction, Story
First Contact
Sarah Watts details how science fiction shaped her family, her religion, and her own self-image.
Posted inFeature, Featured, Nonfiction, Quotes
Taking Cents, Making Sense of a Broken Family
Sari Botton turns to petty – incredibly petty – theft after her family life hits the fan.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Does the Woman in the Painting Have a Secret?
In the wake of her mother’s passing, Dylan Landis wrestles with unanswered questions about love and art, and imagines different possibilities of what could have been.
Posted inBooks, Editor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Featured, First Chapters, Nonfiction
Even the Dogs
In an excerpt from her memoir, T Kira Madden recalls a harrowing adventure with her parents.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Featured, First Chapters, Nonfiction, Story
Even the Dogs
In an excerpt from her memoir, T Kira Madden recalls a harrowing adventure with her parents.