Tag: parents

At age thirty-two, after years working as an exotic dancer, the daughter of a mysteriously absentee father finally puts together the pieces that had been missing her whole life.

Struggling with trauma, sexual objectification, and self-harm, the teenage T Kira Madden found salvation in her close relationships with other young women.

Are we sacrificing our childrens’ inner lives by protecting them too much?

“My father is dead, I said to myself, my father is dead. Again and again I said it, and still I failed to grasp what it meant.”

Morgan Jerkins tackles the time-worn question of how far is too far to go in revealing yourself in first-person writing.

When you don’t need to worry about the big things, you can start obsessing over the small ones.

Raised by a single, independent mother, one young woman struggles with her familial inheritance and the relationship between self-sufficiency and social isolation.

Shelby Vittek reflects on the bittersweet experience of watching herself be born — and her now-divorced mom and dad become parents — again and again.

Meet Fred. He’s cold-blooded, beady-eyed, a picky eater, and likely to outlive us all.

For her essay in the New Yorker, Kate Daloz relied on a precious set of letters to tell the story of her grandmother’s abortion.

Alysia Abbott recalls being raised by her poet father—a single, openly gay man—in the San Francisco of the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

The other day I got some good news and, wanting to share it, reflexively typed “dad” into my phone. There are moments in grief when the finality sets in, and here it was: I would never be able to hear his voice again. But I’ve realized, strangely, that instead of resenting the Internet, I’m grateful […]

The Laidlers’ story is a microcosm of the changing debate over so-called alternative medicine and its cousin, integrative medicine. In 2007, Americans spent $2.9 billion on homeopathic medicine, a treatment based on the belief that minuscule amounts of what causes symptoms in a healthy person will alleviate symptoms in someone who is ill. From nutritional supplements […]

Time for me is double-edged: Every day brings me further from the low of my last cancer relapse, but every day also brings me closer to the next cancer recurrence — and eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The […]

A powerful personal story.

At Vogue, Mira Jacob writes about watching her parents love 30 years after being paired up in an arranged marriage: The night before I went back to New York, I came home to a sight so disquieting that I stood outside in the dark for a full five minutes, just watching. It was late. The […]

It takes us a long time, as children, to get outside of ourselves and realize our parents have lives outside the scope of us. Not just lives before us, or lives after we move out, but wholly private lives that run concurrent with our own upbringing. As her daughter, it took me nearly 20 years […]

For this week’s Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the first chapter of Drew Magary’s new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books). Magary, who writes for Deadspin and GQ, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and he explained how his latest book came together: I was in the middle of writing a second novel that would […]

“How I Met My Dead Parents,” Anya Yurchyshyn, BuzzFeed.

“One recalled that as a girl, she would enact a nocturnal parental ritual in reverse: She, the child, would creep out from her bed to listen at her mother’s door for the precious sound of breathing. ‘She was just terrified,’ Morris says, ‘that her mother would die.’”  “Parents of a Certain Age.” — Lisa Miller, […]