aging
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Transparent and the Evolving Culture of Shame
There’s a ray of nuclear longing at the center of Transparent…
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Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
When my father died my mother was still alive. And I think when your second parent dies, there is that shock: “Oh man, I’m an orphan.” There’s also this relief: It’s done; it’s finished; it’s over. Because I had felt…
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From True Love to Ambivalence
Think your love of certain passages will never fade? The New York Times Sunday Book Review argues that perhaps not all passages will withstand the test of time. How much does age change what we love? If you’re the sort of…
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Forgetting Myself
If you loved Jerry Stahl’s essay “Bad Moments in Parenting” as much as we did, be sure to check out the beautiful, devastating account of of one woman’s experience with dementia by Gerda Saunders. Her deeply personal essay gives insight…
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I Know Death Too Well By Now
In a breathtaking essay on aging, Roger Angell reflects on death. At the age of 93, he writes: “A weariness about death exists in me and in us all in another way, as well, though we scarcely notice it.” Angell has…
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The Big Idea: Rebecca Mead
Suzanne Koven sits down with the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead to discuss My Life in Middlemarch, the way a single great book can illuminate our lives over decades, and how our reading of that book changes as we grow older.
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Icefalls
It seemed like nature might be offering up something fraught with emotion, a beautiful image that a writer could imbue with heartbreaking symbolism. But I couldn’t come up with anything. It was just fall, and so the leaves were red.
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The Rumpus Interview with Monica Drake
Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl and now The Stud Book, discusses the physicality of characters’ bodies, the complicated issues women face while aging, and the crucial nature of writing communities.
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Making Art, Making Gnomes
“No, I am not real. I am like a dude who adjunct teaches at the local college and then, in his free time, makes little gnomes. My music is a hobby. I am making fucking gnomes.”
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Post-Young: The Junky List (or the Incredible Weirdness of Not Being Dead)
At seventeen, all I wanted was to be a famous junky. Like all my heroes. I never actually thought I’d make it.
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Post-Young: Thank You, Dr. Death
We live in heinous times. Times when it’s nearly impossible to be shocked by the sheer horror to which humans subject each other.
