When We Were Friends
Our eyes are bleary, but we are laughing, the kind of laugh that comes before tears.
...more
Posts Tagged: friendship
Living in the Fulcrum: A Conversation with Mary H.K. Choi
Mary H.K. Choi discusses her debut YA novel, Emergency Contact, her versatile writing career, and writing diverse Korean-American characters.
...more
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.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #123: Erica Garza
“[T]here was something really empowering about being honest and open about this part of myself. Somehow, writing helped lessen the shame.”
...more
Understanding the Language of Female Breakups
Female friendship, however necessary it is in our lives, and for all the joy it brings us, for all its love and support and kindness and generosity, can be a real mindf***k when it ends.
...more
The Gate of Permission: A Conversation with Victoria Redel
Victoria Redel discusses her newest novel, Before Everything, living through and beyond grief, and why she loves secrets.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #88: Sarah Gerard
Sarah Gerard’s dazzling second book, Sunshine State, is a collection of essays interlacing narrative nonfiction and personal essay. The thirty-one year old Brooklynite teaches nonfiction and writes a monthly column for Hazlitt. She has received rave reviews from the New York Times, NPR, and The Millions. Using her home state of Florida as the medium to navigate […]
...more
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.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Victim Story, a Mix CD
All the cruelty of the past seasons washed away with the new layer of snow. I thought your streak was over. I thought we could be friends.
...more
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.
...more
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.
...more
A List of Concerns
I’m not sure how it happened, but I’ve ventured beyond what I came to see. The end of the road, the limitless sky—I still haven’t found our prairie.
...more
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.
...more
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.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Angela Palm
Putting experience into words gives them less power over me, I think.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most relevant content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #67: Anuradha Roy
A tranquil beach town named Jarmuli is the setting of Anuradha Roy’s third novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and made the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Four older women travel as friends in search of a bucolic vacation, and a young woman, contending with the […]
...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.
...more
The Last Book I Loved: So Long, See You Tomorrow
By drawing us into his childhood, Maxwell shows us how to revisit our own. We become the storytellers of our own lives.
...more
Voices on Addiction: The Only Thing That Has to Change Is Everything
The word rehab is short for rehabilitate, which means to restore to a former capacity. Like houses, I remember thinking. Demo the kitchen. Tear down the walls.
...more
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.
...moreIn Sickness and Friendship and Jane Austen
Long before Curtis Sittenfeld was a New York Times bestselling author (Eligible), she was friends with Sam Park (This Burns My Heart). And they’re still friends: in an essay for the New Yorker, Sittenfeld chronicles their decades-long platonic romance, from early days collaborating on “50 Most Beautiful Sexiest Men Alive of the Year at Stanford” to dedicating their […]
...more
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.
...moreThe Lyrics of Friendship
What is friendship if not learning the song of another’s heart and singing it back to them? In a reflection on friendship and language, Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova explores Eudora Welty’s writings on the topic. Popova writes: “[I]t might be the basic necessities of friendship, [Welty] suggests, that sparked in us the evolutionary need for […]
...more
The Mortgage Arrangement
It’s true that real estate can’t save a marriage. But it might be equally true that it can save a relationship.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Nabokov’s epilepsy, heart problems, and unpublished letters. A dictionary for the fleshy bits of brain that store our words. Ephemerality meets Instagram. The secret sauce behind NBC’s Olympics telecast. Your designated BFF might not even know your name.
...moreFriendless Female Sex Workers
Not only are these characters destined to die in the cautionary tales and to endure marriages to self-congratulatory men in the redemptions tales, they don’t even have anyone to miss them when they succumb to these fates At Hazlitt, Alana Massey writes about the baseless trope in films of the depraved and friendless female sex […]
...more
Rumpus Original Fiction: Monkey Men
Still lying on the bed in the Wausau hotel room, I started counting ceiling tiles. From above the covers. Not under. Never under. I always feel constricted, under.
...moreWeekly Geekery
If you give a mouse an Orson Welles film, he might solve human consciousness. Your great-great grandkids might text from the grave. What Westerners consider universal about music: totally incorrect. Yes, you can be high on friendship (and it’s a painkiller!). Alas, poor Turing: a rock could pass his test.
...more