Realizing I am a witch has been a life-long, gradual process, but if I had to choose one event to mark my entry into full witchy power, it would be the ritual I created to heal and transform after my abortion at age forty-three. At that time, my husband and I had two young children and two growing careers; we agreed bringing another life into our family would negatively impact its overall well-being. The abortion
Illustrations by Maya Tuncel The July that Woody Allen died was the July I drove off the cliff and lived. Woozy on Vicodin, I said to the nurse, “Thank god he’s finally kicked it.” The hospital TV did not show his most recent self, withered and bent as if against a constant wind, but his young, first-in-love face. When I went off the cliff I thought, This car is going to be totally totaled. I
Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco in My Brilliant Friend, season 2. Courtesy of HBO. Sometimes friendships survive because of the things we don’t say. A few weeks ago, I was walking with a fellow writer down a short trail in Bread Loaf, Vermont, when our conversation turned to our shared love for Elena Ferrante. She told me, after some hesitation, that reading the Neapolitan Novels had left her feeling almost “sick” and “injured,” that the
The Raincoats’s debut self-titled album (Rough Trade, 1979). We have felt sometimes a lack of understanding from some people about what we’re doing. . . . The label tagged on us was feminism—what else? And although we feel that sexual roles are not questioned enough and therefore sickly defined, they are not our only concern and the isolation in whichevery human being seems to be confined hits me very deeply each time I think . . . Subscriber
In October 2021, the culture site Lit Hub published a cheeky advice column by Walker Caplan. To help readers define “autofiction,” the piece offers ten grounding principles for whether a work falls under its purview. They range from “autofiction is when a character lives in New York” to “when you write about something bad you’ve done, that’s autofiction. When you write about something bad done to you, that’s memoir.” Albeit satirical, the list elucidates enduring
Naudline Pierre, ‘Too Much, Not Enough,’ 2019 2020. Oil on canvas, 60 × 40 in. For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be a girl. Even before I knew what it meant to be a girl, what a girl even was, I wanted it. I wanted to be pretty and to be adored in the way that only femmes could be adored. When you see a beautiful femme, it feels like getting
A still from Thelma & Louise (1991), the first road trip movie with women at the wheel. In the summer of 2021, in those halcyon months between vaccination and the Delta wave, I drove from New York to Los Angeles with my friend Julie. I had barely driven since high school, had never driven west, had taken only short road trips with boyfriends who never let me drive. Like everyone else in the world, Julie
Illustration by Mayra Tuncel. Afterward, Lila felt washed clean. Her face was as bare of makeup as a child’s and her insides had a drained, weightless quality, as though wrung of excess moisture. The hospital bed was stacked with so many pillows, pads, and blankets, it was as though she were floating just slightly above the furniture. The pale gray light also had an aura of suspension. It could have signified morning, afternoon, or evening.
October 2021 The sun is out, and Julie’s still in bed at noon, one, three, and still at half-past four. Another bright October day, one more spent walking, writing e-mails, solitude become habitual, there, here. My mood depends on the temperature outdoors, and if the sky is bright or going dour. I take one of two morning walks, once I’ve had mint tea. Coffee, awakening’s elixir, leaves a sour taste in my mouth now, a
After Geek Love became a best seller and earned nominations for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize, and after she had earned the admiration of early 1990s punk icons like Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Gus Van Sant, and Tim Burton, Katherine Dunn wrote for long stretches in the solitude of a large blue house in Portland, Oregon. Before that, in the 1970s, Dunn was recently separated from her first husband and wrote
