What Sustains Me
In my marriage, food was love. And control. And coercion. And apologies.
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Posts Tagged: relationships
A Haunted Reality: Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It
The narration isn’t dispassionate, but there’s a distance.
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A Façade of a Woman: R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries
It is incredible to crack open an American novel and wince upon seeing parts of yourself reflected back so strikingly.
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Mixed Feelings: The Power and Limits of Labels
Maybe I’m not bisexual. What am I?
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Confessions of the Fox
I liked the skeptical way she looked at me. I liked the way the air in the house felt with her in it.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Meghan Flaherty
Meghan Flaherty discusses her debut memoir, Tango Lessons, how the book found its current format, and writing a memoir at a young age.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Lacking World
I acted childishly. But, in my defense, it was childish only if we actually lived in a world where Shakespeare had never existed.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #138: Melissa Broder
“We have what we need inside us already, it’s just a question of uncovering it, of remembering who we are again and again.”
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Mixed Feelings: Your Divorce Won’t Ruin Your Kids
Marriage is one way of housing love. But there are a hundred other houses—sometimes you just have to build them yourself.
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In the Wake of His Damage
To be named, and yet not named. Something broke in me when I read his synopsis of us, as if I had been summarily dismissed after twenty long years.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “The Last Civilized House” by Lee Martin
Once upon a time, there was a man and a wife and a child that the wife decided she didn’t want.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Drink the Wine That Moves You
Were they all just kittens, really, the comfort of their warm blood the only defense between life and a dump in the river?
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Even the Moon
When you finished, several minutes passed before we spoke. You dipped a finger in a pool of candle wax. How could I know this was the only real secret you’d ever kept?
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Voices on Addiction: Need and Smoke
Need had carved out specific contours in my personality, and then it returned like a curse to fit in those spaces.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Rebecca
Grace shook her head, surprised by both her reluctance to speak and her impulse to lie. She had seen many photos of Rebecca.
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I Thought You Were Different
I don’t tell him that just because I happen to be black and he happens to be dating me means that there’s no chance that he could be a racist. I am not a pass.
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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.”
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This Is What I Get for Wanting
When I cried over the phone, asking him if he was dumping me, he said in his gentle voice, “Sweetheart, we weren’t really a thing yet.”
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Mixed Feelings: Am I Too Fat For Love?
We don’t like to think that love traffics in the same biases that shape our culture—but of course it does.
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I Dated Bad Men Till a Bad Man Became President
Their dishonesty and danger was easier to look past then. The world had not yet shifted. But then it did, and I woke up.
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On Lingerings
The U-Haul’s gone now. It made me sad earlier to look up and find its door locked. Maybe because I know how much ends when everything’s loaded.
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How to Keep Score
I’m still working on this balance, and given that I only have about eighty or ninety years tops to get it right, I doubt I ever will.
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Thick and Thin
Today is not the day I can eat like a normal person and not tomorrow either. But maybe the day after that or the next one after.
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Mixed Feelings: How Do You Break a Heart?
What should love cost us? What do we owe one another? What, especially, do we owe those who have chosen to love and trust us?
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Going Off-Script: A Conversation with Mandy Len Catron
Mandy Len Catron discusses How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays, what makes for a thoughtful love story, and the politics of love.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Prescriptions
I wore sobriety like a shirt that was too tight in the shoulders, and everyone around me knew it.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Mutual Exploitation
There was a lot one could see about other people, when those people didn’t see them.
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