The problem with any writer who happens to experience that rare, fleeting phenomenon known as “external validation” is that for a few moments, we go a little mad. Which is to say: we start believing our own hype. And for a writer, truly, what greater madness is there than believing in yourself? Don’t get me…
I graduated high school in 1998, either (depending on which arbitrary marker you choose) the last of Gen-Xers or the first of the Millennials. Like so many of us who came of age in the 90s, Friends was a delightful, aspirational glimpse of the future. (I had no perspective to realize that my friends of…
My writing pitches don’t get accepted often. Sometimes an editor will contact me directly, and I’ll send them a piece, and if it gets published, it may do quite well (my piece on bullying for The Washington Post was an example of that), but it rarely gets to that point. More often than not, I’ll…
Hello, hi, yes, I would like to speak to the manager please? No, I don’t think that this is something you could help me with … okay. Okay, fine. Yes, so I’ve been shopping here for several years, and it’s always been a really positive experience. But yesterday I was walking down the freezer aisle…
(Pictured above: me during a far less neurotic presentation.) I am standing in front of a crowd under blinding fluorescent lights. They appear to be listening to my every word. And I am positively bombing. The room is too bright, and I can see everyone’s faces, but I am absolutely unable to read their expressions.…
I had not worn the socks in years when I fished them out of the back of the drawer. They had survived the journey to college and six subsequent moves. They were one of the few relics of my past that had not been destroyed in the recent fire that consumed my mother’s home. They…
Dear Friends, As you know, Rand and I are social creatures. We thrive on seeing the people we love, on following the winding paths of your lives, on quietly building a history of private jokes and shared experiences together. We aren’t simply growing old with each other, we are growing old with all of you,…
It’s December, which means that you’ve probably read all of the daring thinkpieces about how Love, Actually is the greatest holiday movie, ever, despite its many, many flaws, or the other, more daring thinkpieces about how Love, Actually, is the worst holiday movie, ever, because of the aforementioned flaws. And I shouldn’t be adding gasoline…
The letter arrived at my house at the end of October in a plain white envelope with no return address. My name – or some approximation of it (“Depruiter” it reads, because, in the words of my beloved, “The person who addressed it is an idiot”) has been printed out on a label and affixed…
Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
by Geraldine DeRuiter
Available Now!
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