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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 […]
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But was I an alcoholic? The idea had never crossed my mind. The more I reflected on it, the less I understood.
...moreWhat 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 […]
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It’s true that real estate can’t save a marriage. But it might be equally true that it can save a relationship.
...moreNabokov’s epilepsy, heart problems, and unpublished letters.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.
...moreNot 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 […]
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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.
...moreIf 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.
...moreThere’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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If we’re honest with ourselves, the great loves of our lives are often platonic.
...moreTI say we are not together. I say that we are not together, but I see him everywhere. He spent a summer here, summers and summers ago, and I booked my ticket to get closer to him and I booked my ticket to get away from him. He said they love Iranians in Turkey. They’ll […]
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I picture families lingering over albums in the faraway future, someone leaning over someone else’s shoulder, pointing at me, asking, Who was that?
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Check out Deborah Treisman in lively conversation with Lara Vapnyar on the “miracle of a New York City adventure,” the bewitching, wish-granting power of Leonard Cohen’s songs, and Russian immigrants. Vapnyar’s forthcoming novel, Still Here, explores Russian culture in the US, friendship, and eternal life on the Internet.
...moreA connection so fundamentally optional doesn’t provide the same ambivalence and tension you get with alcoholic parents, narcissistic spouses, or resentful bosses. If your friend abuses you or your trust, you can just walk away. Slate’s Laura Miller explains why nobody writes memoirs about their friends, and then looks at two recent books that take […]
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It is remembering and loving anyway—not forgetting—that binds us even if the recollections are absurd, undignified, cruel, or humiliating.
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I wonder if in absence I will now come to conflate him with the character I’ve drawn. Or with the character I’m drawing now.
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The Rumpus Book Club talks with Paul Lisicky about his new book The Narrow Door>/em>, how much of your story you own, and the importance of reading your own work aloud.
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Author Elisa Gabbert talks about her books, The Self Unstable and The French Exit, diversity, publishing, whiteness, and writing in the Internet Age.
...moreOver the last several weeks, The Offing has been releasing a stream of stunning work from its 2015 Trans Issue, and the collection of transgender/non-binary voices they’ve cultivated forms one of the most powerful issues of any magazine we’ve seen this year. One story that stands out as a star among stars is Casey Plett’s “Couldn’t […]
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A poetic friendship, a good one, is hardly ever something that requires a group.
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I lost a best friend and that means something, but you cannot deny that to go on the grief has to stop killing you, eventually.
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Mot was living my own fear… I wanted to learn from him how I might survive, if I too ended up without a home, without the resources to live what I thought of as a minimally decent life.
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Ottessa Moshfegh discusses her first full-length novel, Eileen, betrayal, self-aware narrators, and the catalytic properties of friendship.
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The proof of their friendship came through years of devotion.
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The stuff I’ve saved over the years aren’t just mementos of the past. They’re also reflections of the memories my friends and I have made together.
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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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Author Neil Smith discusses his latest book, Boo, the suffering inherent in being thirteen years old, and how friendship can help pull us through traumatic events in our lives.
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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.
...moreTwitter isn’t always toxic. The technology of the dinosaur epic. Score one for lady gamers. Can math solve questions of authorship? Toys are as creepy as you think.
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