When We Were Friends
Our eyes are bleary, but we are laughing, the kind of laugh that comes before tears.
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Posts Tagged: female friendship
The Rumpus Mini-Interview #141: Tara Isabella Burton
“I want to make a case for the serious, literary legitimacy of the female experience of self-construction.”
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Fandom and Family: Talking with Ted Scheinman
Ted Scheinman discusses his deep-dive into Jane Austen superfan culture, Camp Austen, how the Internet has fostered fandom culture, and whether being an editor helps his writing.
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Playing Whack-a-Mole: Talking with Leslie Pietrzyk
Leslie Pietrzyk discusses her new novel, Silver Girl, writing a nonlinear narrative, and depicting female friendships in new ways.
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“The Book I Said I Would Never Write”: Talking with Karolina Ramqvist
Karolina Ramqvist discusses The White City, her first novel to be translated to English, and the idea of a writer’s persona out in the world versus a just being a writer, writing.
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Saying What Shouldn’t Be Said: A Conversation with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, why writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world, and finding truths in fiction.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Suzuki and Kawasaki in the Dominican Republic
We are all punchlines. Projections of projections of projections. But whose joke is it? And where is the bill?
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, a short story in the new issue of Cosmonauts Avenue turns the flashlight onto a slumber party, and not the fantasy pillow-fight and popcorn kind, but the more true-to-life kind, complete with paranormal library books, urban legends, sneaking out, and scaring the crap out of each other. “Bunny Man” by Simone Person tells […]
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, the writers and books that influenced it, tackling addiction with compassion, and the magic of teenage girls.
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Concubines and Expat Husbands: Catching Up with Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan discusses her new novel, Sarong Party Girls, concubine culture, and the freedom of writing fiction after a career in journalism.
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Learning to Live Alone through the Legacy of Mary Tyler Moore
Characters like Mary and Rhoda hadn’t been turned into stereotypes of single women in their thirties or career women or divorcees. They couldn’t be: they were the first.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Maybe There’s This Dragon?
Maybe I’ve been here too long. Maybe I’ve finally accepted that the apartment is somehow aspirational. Maybe there’s this dragon.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, rising voice Emma Horwitz writes about teenage girls looking for some under-the-pants action (if you know what I mean (I’m talking about fingering)) at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Horwitz’s story, appropriately titled “Fingering,” is a welcome and refreshing addition to the small range of narratives that show teenage girls as the single-minded, sex-mad creatures […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Kerry and Tyler Cohen
Sisters and collaborators Kerry and Tyler Cohen talk about their new book Girl Trouble: An Illustrated Memoir, female friendships, and some of the challenges of writing memoir.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson discusses her latest novel Another Brooklyn, the little deaths of lost friendships, and her work with children across the country as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, we all need a story with heart and teeth, a story that celebrates the glittering intelligence of women and the power of female friendship and dismantles the patriarchy while also being laugh-out-loud funny, a story with a happy ending. That story is Alice Kaltman’s “Boss Man” in the latest issue of Storychord, out […]
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Voices on Addiction: The Ghost Inside
But was I an alcoholic? The idea had never crossed my mind. The more I reflected on it, the less I understood.
...moreFiction’s Rise of Female Friendships
Readers are shifting focus from outdated gender expectations and conceptions of identity, and as a result, complex, non-compartmentalized female friendships are blooming in fiction. Books about these friendships are spaces for female writers and readers to explore the complexity of their relationships and selves without the influence of men, whose presence can quickly turn a […]
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The Diary of Anaïs Nin While Binge-Watching Broad City
One episode after another with every outrageous twist and turn. I smile but no laughter comes—just a gaping mouth wishing to devour more!
...moreUntil Death
There’s a piece of writing advice that tritely insists that great pain makes for great writing. In reality, it often takes years to find the words for a painful event, and even then there is the nagging insufficiency of words and the threat of ego that comes with writing one’s own pain. For BuzzFeed Books, […]
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Female Friendships and Online Literary Sexism
As an essayist who often writes from personal experience and who’s working on a memoir, I believe deeply it is a feminist act for women to tell their stories.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jen Pastiloff
I am good at making people feel safe.
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An Unnatural Mother: Elena Ferrante and Motherhood
Reading Ferrante is an intensely personal experience, and it’s disorienting to realize it’s one you’ve been having collectively.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Across the Divide
The proof of their friendship came through years of devotion.
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The Rumpus Interview with Sarah Gerard
Author Sarah Gerard talks about her novel, Binary Star, her chapbook, BFF, dysfunctional relationships, and what it means to be best friends forever.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Sarah Hepola
Editor and writer Sarah Hepola talks about her new memoir Blackout, how gender affects alcoholism, writing about female friendships, and the writers who’ve influenced her.
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Is That So?
I’ve got milk. I’ve got it soaking through disposable nursing bra pads, small disks the size and shape of sand dollars, and dripping down my shirt. Jesus, how much, exactly, is there? you wonder. Or not.
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Like a Rock
When I think about relationships that I idolize from literature, they are almost all friendships based on loyalty and adventure.
...moreBFFs in Elena Ferrante Novels
The literary idea that friends’ lives represent unmade choices, roads not taken, is applicable across gender and genre. Naturally, however, it has a particular resonance for women, because so many of life’s choices have particular resonance for women. Whether in 2015 United States or in postwar, pre-feminist Italy, women still feel like they have to […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Elisa Albert
Elisa Albert discusses her new novel, After Birth, postpartum depression, childbearing, and the misogyny of modern medicine in pathologizing the normal processes of birth and the female body.
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