my grief over burvil’s absence has taken the form of antique blue glassware, i tell my art therapist.
Continue readinggrief in glass
Category Archives: “women”
my life with burvil, love of my life
fragments, in no order, in and out of time.
***
but then you always knew exactly what you wanted to be, burvil says.
i’m watching an orange cat on an adjacent roof top stretching out in a patch of sunshine while another cat, a black one- who obviously likes the orange one more than the orange one likes it- tries to insinuate itself into the periphery of the spot of sunshine in which the orange cat is lying when i hear her say this. when she drops this revelation that i’ve always had my whole life figured out.
and i say, shut the front door.
something i have never thought, much less said aloud, in my life and certainly not to my grandmother.
but it was inconceivable that there could be any amnesia regarding how completely clueless i have been about how i wanted my life to look, how it took me, like, DECADES to convince myself that what i write has value and that my life could and should be the strangely impossible wonderfully weird thing that it has become.
apparently burvil had this idea that everyone else knows what they’re doing with their lives and she’s the only one who made it up as she went along.
and i say, gran, gran, really, NO. remember how i was going to be a veterinarian because i wrote that on a blue star in fifth grade? i didn’t know what i was doing. i just kept doing it.
i’m so relieved, she says, that you’re like me.
and i think, i am too, burvil. i am too.
scattered memories of challenger
what i remember is all of the adults in my life going into the den and shutting the door.
that’s not actually an accurate memory, as it was my mother and ann, our cleaner, and then, later, my dad. but that’s the memory. the adults in a room with the door shut and me, age 4 1/2, on the other side of it.
this was the year after The Year Everyone Died– my friend from next door, my mother’s grandfather, my father’s boss– so we were already, then, somewhat a house in mourning. or, at the very least, a house that had spent a lot of the previous year avoiding discussion of grief and death whilst living submerged within it.
Continue readingmen have raped me.
(CW: rape)
always use the active voice. that is what mrs. reynolds taught us in AP english. that is what so many of my english teachers have told me since. what they did not tell us was the cost. (<- engaging opening anecdote)
they made it sound so easy. dear people, it is not. (<- connecting with the audience through a direct address)
the thing is, the whole language works against us. the sentence structures work against us. the institutions do not love us and neither do our words.
because it is far, far easier, in english at least, for me to have been raped than for a man to have raped me, for men to have raped me. Continue reading
a brief word on this portrayal of duchess kate’s white fragility
whew, PEOPLE. if ever there was a day built for rage?! and it is not yet noon US EST!
between the horrifying story of a police officer murdering an unnamed Black man in minneapolis, the video of amy cooper calling the police on a birder who asked her to leash her dog, the president of notre dame’s op-ed in the times about the risks we must all sustain for the education of students (ie. the continuation of american football), AND the president of purdue’s op-ed in the post about moral responsibility of reopening in the fall (ie. capitalism and the continuation of american football), i would like to go back to bed and spend the day reading my trashy novel about a kept woman falling madly in love a rake with waterloo PTSD while teaching him how to cheat at vingt-et-un in regency england.
ALAS, NO. i cannot do that, because today is also the day that the daily mail posted this nonsense.
which, if we’re in some sort of white supremacy/white fragility/white tears carnival time– and that does increasingly seem to be what was meant by “reopening”– hardly ranks supreme. but it is nonetheless, stupidly consistent with this broader alignment of the racist stars and worth a gander, especially due to the subtlety of the pandering and the broader agenda of thumbs up-ing white femininity. (please, lawd, this is not the gemini season i wanted.) Continue reading
prince andrew’s awfulness (a recap)
riddle me this: are you familiar with why prince andrew is awful? back up. do you even know who prince andrew is?? much less, why he need be deemed awful?
oh hayyy, let’s talk.
on jessica simpsons’s memoir
i am giving myself exactly one hour and thirty-eight minutes in which to write about this. because there are 19 papers that need to be graded and i’m leaving for an estate sale with a friend at 9:45, but there are things i gots to say.
THE JESSICA SIMPSON MEMOIR IS AMAZING. Continue reading
on silence
for the last few weeks, i’ve been working on a thing that lacks form– it may be an article or it may be a book.
it is, undoubtedly, a story in progress.
i’ve pursued it through haphazard writing and numerous conversations over expensive dinners i can’t really afford.
still, i do not know what it will be.
(via Getty)
i think it’s something though.
there is a there there.
i want to talk about carolyn bessette kennedy
even though there is not a lot to say beyond the same old thing that it seems i always say, which is: OMG, why are we not better at this???!?!
it is 2019. it is twenty years later. it’s been all that time and we still suck.
(by bruce weber)
lee radziwill’s career
(via NYT)
lee radziwill has died.
there. i did it. i wrote that sentence without referencing that she is the sister of jackie onassis.
an alarming life 
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