Gentrification, and analogies for it, are the focus of Mary Biddinger’s poetry collection A Sunny Place With Adequate Water, reviewed by Danielle Susi. The inhumanity of coin-operated machinery serves as a theme. Moments of “lucidity” make these poems “a little weird, a little quirky, and a lot beautiful.”
Then, in the Saturday Essay, Tara Isabella Burton looks back on her teenage relationship with the groundbreaking television drama Gilmore Girls and its eerie mimicry of her own life. Drawing comparisons between the female characters on the show and the women in her own family, Burton finds a new appreciation for Gilmore Girls. The lens of nostalgia allows her to see that “it’s okay to grow up,” perhaps because the mother and daughter she loves “always find their way back to one another again.”
Finally, Zoe Zolbrod interviews Chloe Caldwell about her writing, which include the essay collection Legs Get Led Astray and the new novella Women. Though Caldwell—a noted Dear Sugar reader—shies away from labeling, she acknowledges that elements of memoir creep into fiction in the novella. “The narrator is not me,” she admits. “It’s also not, not me.”
