Tag
Family
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Destroying Families
“Women—who disproportionately carry the burden of caregiving and are often left alone when partners are kidnapped—are pushed into deeper poverty and isolation.”
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Disability Narratives
Ask most people living with a disability to name their least favorite question and “what happened to you?” will be high on the list. “Wanting to educate yourself about disability and learn more is great, but there’s a time and a place,” writes Erin Tatum in Everyday Feminism magazine. “You should have enough sensibility and…
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The Thread
1 Sometime during my senior year of high school, my mother went on a laundry strike. Her goal, as I understood it, was to get my father to pick his underwear up off the bathroom floor, carry them to the hamper, and eventually wash them. She made my brother and I promise not to help…
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What’s in a Face?
According to Jewish tradition, before each of us was born, we were visited by an angel who taught us all that is known and all that will be known. We were wise, in utero. And then, in the very last moments prior to birth, that same angel (known as Lailah, “night”), tapped us between the…
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The Rubble of Beirut
Lebanese author Elias Khoury’s latest novel to be translated into English, Broken Mirrors, is about identity and memory, destruction and displacement, exile and its internal ruptures. The book opens …
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Gaitskill’s Fictions of Disappointment
In “A Romantic Weekend,” a story from Mary Gaitskill’s first collection, Bad Behavior, a man and a woman who are only casually acquainted go out of town for the weekend. The two seem to have met in a bar, or possibly an S/M club, and recognize in each other the complementary desire to humiliate and…
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Making “Room”: An Interview with Novelist and Screenwriter Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room is the story of a 5-year-old boy who lives in a single room with his mother and has never seen the outside world. Donoghue recently adapted her novel into a screenplay, and the resulting film, starring Brie Larson, has been sweeping up accolades. It’s nominated for four Academy Awards on…
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Why Boys Must Cry
In contemporary Nigerian literature, muscular heroes of postcolonial independence have lost their swagger. Today’s patriarchs read like quaint fogies, stomping their feet about government, money, and gender roles. Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel, The Fishermen, recuperates this toothless archetype with superb grace. His task is not to rescue the patriarch from becoming his country’s flattest character…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Empire”
After it debuted last January on Fox, Empire quickly became one of the most talked-about shows on television. Its Shakespearean portrayal of family life, its stylized window onto the hip-hop industry, and its Timbaland-produced soundtrack helped it earn millions of passionate fans (and more than a few critics). To celebrate the premiere of season 2—which…
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Franzen Makes Nice
Reading Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, in a state at once sympathetic and skeptical, I kept thinking of George Kaplan. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest, a ring of foreign spies mistakes the protagonist, Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, for Kaplan, a fictional decoy created by the CIA. No matter how strenuously Thornhill protests…
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On Longer Lives and Longer Deaths
America has many open secrets. The nursing home is one of them. We try not to think too hard or too long about its residents or its low-wage staff. We’ll confront its smell, its humiliations, its bleakness, only once we need it …
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Do We Need Wonder Woman?
My two-year-old daughter plays on the beach in a tiny red, white, and blue swimsuit, her chest emblazoned with winged yellow Ws that need no explanation. At a glance, the suit appears of a piece with the branded Dora the Explorer and Mermaid Ariel gear sported by fellow toddlers frolicking on the shoreline. Unlike her…
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Dad’s Dictionary
My father has a refrain for when he overhears one of us, his three children, make a grammatical mistake. “You speak exactly one language, so speak it correctly!” My father grew up in a formerly French territory in South India, so he spoke Tamil at home, was educated in English, learned French in school, picked…
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Linklater’s Gooey Realism
Richard Linklater’s acclaimed Boyhood is an ambitious film about a Texas boy named Mason, a millennial everyman played by Ellar Coltrane, as he matures from ages 6 to 18. Along the way, he proceeds through the more or less familiar milestones of middle-class life, including, among others, recognition of a disenchanted universe (magic is a…
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This is What I Mean When I Tell My Dad He’s Alright
Mattie Wechsler’s essay won the 2014 Katherine Fullerton Gerould Award Prize at Bryn Mawr College. When I was growing up, my father kept a pronunciation dictionary of the English language by his seat at the table. This way, if there were ever a dispute during dinner about how to pronounce a word correctly, he could…
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Was That All There Was to the Left?
In the wake of Pete Seeger’s death in January, eulogies, memorials, and obituaries routinely mentioned his youthful communist affiliation. The famous folk singer had, like many of his contemporaries in the world of arts and music, joined the Communist Party (CPUSA) as a young man. He did so in the late 1930s—a time when not…
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Queer Magic
Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Michelle Tea’s Mermaid in Chelsea Creek both use magic to imagine solutions to childhood anxieties: What do you do when your family doesn’t feel like one? What kind of alternate kinship is available to a kid disempowered by age, obedience, and dependence? How might…
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Flight Patterns
Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic revolves around two missives that reach unanticipated recipients. The first is an undelivered letter written by an American daughter, Emily Ehrlich, on behalf of her Irish mother, Lily Duggan, to the woman who helped Lily leave her life as a maid in 19th-century Dublin. The second is The Narrative of the…
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This Morning Was a Poem: On and Near Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby
Rebecca Solnit’s new memoir, The Faraway Nearby, is a morning poem. Last summer, I sat outside on a covered patio beneath the awning and read it straight through. I read for hours. The book had been widely praised in reviews from the New York Times to Slate, The Millions, and beyond. It would soon be…
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The Laughing Animal
Karen Joy Fowler’s most recent novel is a glimmeringly dark and clever book about the possibility of mutual happiness between human and nonhuman animals. Like much contemporary fiction, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves tells the story of an unconventional family in a mildly unconventional way. What makes Fowler one of our more significant funny…
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Dream Girls
Hilton Als’s White Girls is a disorienting book. If traditional biography aspires to capture the person behind the scrim of myth, Als prefers to linger on the scrim itself—the fantasy, the persona, the aura of celebrity—the fiction. His essay on Truman Capote focuses on the writer’s public image, beginning with the famous book-jacket photo of…
