People
In Difficult Love: When Your Childhood Maps Who and How You Love
I grew up with food stamps, latchkeys, Lee jeans from an outlet, Campbell’s soup, three deadbeat dads, and a mother who wrote letters to a TV evangelist praying for a husband.
What My Godfather’s Glass Eye Taught Me About Disability Humor
“When is disability humor appropriate and when isn’t it?”
Ernst Haeckel, the Eugenicist Who Designed My Tattoos
Science is not now, nor has ever been, objective, fair, or inclusive.
‘Spanish Harlem’: From Childhood Song to Caregiving Anthem
“My parents are quietly crumbling, and their house is crumbling around them.”
I Thought Figure Skating Wasn’t for a Girl Like Me
Skating was for graceful girls, pretty girls. Girls with money. Not a girl like me.
On Miscarriage, Motherhood, and Wanting to Control What You Cannot See
On the day when two pink lines stared up at me, I wondered which set of events I had set in motion. A baby? Or not a baby?
What a Woman Loses When She Turns Thirty Years Old
I feel what I feel, and I cry in the shower with a beer, but the week before I turned thirty, I felt nothing.
My Brother Died from a Heroin Overdose
I leaned over the casket with tears streaming down my face. They dripped onto my brother’s body, his hands, my hands.
Freeing Myself from Grad School, I Rediscover Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Mystics
I try to use my master’s thesis as a way to find myself in women’s writing—the mystics, Flannery—but, ultimately, I fail.
Body Armour: From Gymnastics to Scoliosis
“He traced my spine. It turned out to be curvy, a little snake made of bones.”