Not just eating disorders, but mental health in general, I think, is probably the last frontier of empathy in our culture. I’m not a journalist, I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a health care worker, but I am somebody who has been through this before and I’m also a writer. I think with that […]
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We were both fighting with our mothers to be seen and accepted; it mattered to us as daughters that we had that kind of support.
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My mother’s body horrified me. Nine years old, I watched her dress. Her belly was rippled and sagged and scarred—a used-up bag of nothing.
...moreThe violences that women fear and the violences that women carry are violences of objectification, of involuntary disembodiment. The transformation of a human into a thing.
...moreIt’s easy to forget just how fraught our culture’s relationship with food is, until you see example after example of “food horror” piled on top of each other like so many potato chips. Which is to say that Future Shipwreck‘s supercut of negative depictions of food in the TV series Pretty Little Liars is strangely compelling and not […]
...moreThat the Ironman participant may be as vain or as emotionally distressed as a freely directed exerciser becomes irrelevant, because the Ironman race, like a Thanksgiving feast, takes place in the presence of many others pursuing the same extreme pleasure. It has finite, communally agreed-upon bounds. Thanksgiving lasts for only one day; an Ironman has three […]
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Every Halloween, the ghost of my 11 year-old self haunts me. She’s in the candy aisle at Rite Aid gorging on fun-size Twix bars. She’s wrapping candy corn lights around her neck. She’s trying on a vampire costume grinning through plastic fangs with a scraggly black wig in her eyes. She’s concerned about extra roll […]
...moreThree generations of women cope with isolation, grief, and sex, in the first novel by the celebrated story writer, Rachel Sherman.
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