“I was looking for something gentle in the middle of writing violence, and it appeared in studying the face of a tiny baby badger.”

Her theme is the well-kept secret that is women’s solitude, and in particular the rigorous work women artists do to protect their creative space––its own kind of long distance.

Read like it’s mating season.

No matter what we’re fleeing or moving toward, we must have a relationship with the present.

Deifying algorithms and quantum computers is untruthful; it is manipulative. It is the very slipperiness on which a technocratic, self-referential satire must rely in order to win over its human viewers.

An introduction to the Creepy Autodiegetic Male Narrator, or CAMN.

“When I was a child, luxury for me was fur coats, long dresses, villas next to the sea. Later, I believed it was living an intellectual life. Now, it’s also the ability to experience passion for another person.” - Annie Ernaux

Even if you believe that reading about other people’s tragedies is good for, I don’t know, some vague thing we call “empathy,” it’s not clear that such empathy flows naturally out of a play or novel or film.

At the beating heart of this book is, for me, a dream: that old age might be as vibrant as this.

These two particular doses of highly intelligent snark — of anger made into art — have been a balm during this waking nightmare that is the latest news cycle.

The womb-like purple room is haunted, but it is also therapeutic.

Check out my essay at LitHub (and read a section from the piece that I ended up cutting)!

…if, like me, you are overwhelmed by the pile.

If you’ve surprised yourself––if you’ve tapped into “crazy stuff that can’t be planned” as you channel your narrator––then you leave an imprint of that surprise on the page for your reader.

There’s something about these at best qualmish, at worst faux-pious young adults in the early-sixties that makes you want to be part of a generation with a backbone.

For the first time in fifteen years, no one was emailing me.

What is the difference between Big Tech’s surveillance of our consciousness — their playing god — and a fiction writer’s?

To me, even more than being about medieval nuns, this novel is Groff’s ars poetica — her assertion of what it takes to be a woman artist.

Here are my four favorite books from 2021.

Feminists have always known that patriarchy is designed to divide and conquer -- to keep women from, well, talking: to each other, and about the violent acts (or the specter of them) that produce their submission and compliance.