I woke up this morning, our sixth week of sheltering-in-place, or maybe our seventh (I’ve lost count) and the days have started to run together in a way they never have before. I thought time only worked like that in memory. When I think of the summer after high school or Christmas breaks when I…
Social isolation has sort of felt like a break-up – a sensation that, after nearly 20 years with my husband, returns to me like a hazy, rotten memory. “Oh, this,” I think, as I pull myself out of bed, forgetting what day it is, and mash an OREO into my maw. “I remember this. It…
My city feels strangely still right now. I normally hear the sounds from the elementary school nearby, or people walking their dogs, the swish of cars driving by on the street. But it’s oddly quiet at the moment, the only sound the squawking from a few irritable crows whose life mission is to make sure…
Harvey Weinstein was found guilty today on some (but not all) of the charges brought against him by the state of New York. And I find this unbelievable, not because I believed in his innocence in any measure, but because I believe in the ability – as old as history and time itself – of…
My husband turned 40 at the beginning of July. I wanted a Bacchanalian celebration, cake and lights and streamers and swarms of people, forgetting entirely that this milestone wasn’t about me. The realization would hit me eventually, before too much planning had occurred: he didn’t want a big to-do. Nor did he want, he insisted,…
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…
We went to Germany, and I cried. Not right away. It wasn’t until the last day that I finally did. Rand asked if I wanted to rent a car to go down to see my father’s grave. He asked me in the early hours of the morning, when jet lag had us both exhausted but…
Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
by Geraldine DeRuiter
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