When discussing Eimear McBride’s new novel The City Changes Its Face, we could start with the Jonathan Franzen/Ben Marcus tete-a-tete that occurred two decades ago, when the “make it accessible,”
The most unforgivable thing I’ve done that didn’t involve sex or lying was today, I was wiping the track before the next train and this man was squelched black in bone tatters in the middle, and I
We started off as strangers,
you and I.
And I’ll always wonder -
if there had been others
would I have picked you?
Your brothers were already gone
by the time I got there
so I paid for
Why the fuck would a seventeen-year-old girl from Akron, Ohio say something like that? Why would that even be in her repertoire?
One grotesque morning, our friend Dani—frequent companion in cocaine-fueled escapades—stumbled from the spare room, blacked-out, around sunrise.
It is Winter again. I am not myself.
Cherry nausea tablets dissolve under my tongue every morning, ostensibly tricking my mind from dry-heaving, and sleeping requires triple the dosage of Trazodone
I draw the line at unboxing videos.
This is what we tell ourselves about places like this: that they belong only to a certain New York, a New York of discrete transactions and brass plaques reading “Jeffrey E. Epstein Corporation.”
But even when I felt ashamed for liking her, I also saw her as somehow supernaturally chosen for me. She rejected me from the moment we met.
I love idiots. Or at least some of them anyway.
One of the most profound aesthetic experiences of my life involved falling asleep in an armchair in the middle of the afternoon while reading The Fairie Queene. I did not dream of Britomart and Sir
I wanted to see if I could pass as someone who belongs.
Alright, Mariely, Jelly Belly. Pretend you are a person who has friends. You can send this text message. It’s fine. They don’t know you
Me sitting down before a cheesecake factory menu
and seeing only letters.
Me fucking without even a hair as much the enjoyment
I get from a waffle--
Junah at the End of the World is about, well, Junah, a twelve-year old boy going through the uncertainty of Y2K. It’s funny to look back at that time and to think about how different things were, to
That day I let him touch me in his car on the side of the train tracks outside of town.
Do not follow your child too closely. Hovering makes it look like something might go wrong, which of course it might, but the point of these events is to pretend it won’t. Maintain a five-foot buffer
At six years old, I wanted to be a boy. I cut my hair short. I wore blue shorts. I ran around with my shirt off. I threw oranges at my sister and her friends.
Peter does not center himself as an influencer-writer-genius producing work so insular few can relate. Instead, he masterfully turns the tables.
“He copied and pasted your text and sent it to me.” I rephrased it.
They always share their worst secrets with me and look to me for female forgiveness.
On the television, Paul Hollywood is doling out handshakes - I'd settle for eye contact from my husband-
If you grew up here, an old man, maybe your uncle, would inform you many times that the sand in Ocean City was not real sand, but synthetic sand made in a factory.
I still had to sneak out of my house to go out at night. Mom and Dad liked to pretend I was a little angel virgin who didn’t know the lecherous ways of men. Too bad for them. They’d raised me with a
That date where he asked if we could have a threesome and I said no and so we had sex on his roof instead
