(Above: my student ID in 1999. Let’s just keep our comments to ourselves.) There’s this pattern I keep seeing. It goes like this: Woman accuses man of sexual assault. Man denies accusations. Man’s PR team then releases numerous letters from women saying that he’s not a sexual harasser because, you know, he didn’t harass…
I quit Twitter for a month. This should not sound like a profound thing, but for someone for whom the social media platform was essentially an extension of my psyche, the act has felt monumental. I have said, again and again (usually when talking of internet abuse and responding to people who tell me that…
Trigger warning: please note that this is a blog post about online abuse, and includes screen caps of tweets sent to me. Graphic threats and abusive, hateful language toward women appear therein. A few weeks ago, I gave a keynote talk at World Domination Summit in Portland. The thesis: while we regard online misogyny and abuse…
My beloved wrote a book. How it came to be was radically different from my own path. When I wrote a book, it became a job, it became the thing I was doing because on a daily basis, there’s not that much else that is asked of me. But there are always things asked of…
“Why do they have so many copies of my book? Is that a bad sign? Does that mean no one’s buying it?” “No. Your book has been out for a year, and they have a lot of copies. That’s a good sign. That means they keep it in stock.” “Are you sure? Because doesn’t it…
I don’t know what writer’s block looks like for other people. I’ve never discussed it with my friends who write professionally, perhaps because it seems like a silly, self-indulgent think to talk about. “Hello, friends who also make a living making sentences. Do you know how sometimes the sentences are hard to make? How putting…
My husband and I are driving through southern Oregon, like we have every summer since we were married. I see a Red Lobster. I scream. I tell him to pull over immediately. He ignores me. After more than a decade together he can distinguish between my “something is urgently wrong” scream and my “I need…
I have an excellent memory. In the aftermath of my brain surgery, my biggest fear was that my ability to recount past events was damaged in some way. Under the haze of anesthesia, I walked around the park near our old home with Rand, struggling to piece together the last few days. I’d struggled through…
It is a strange statement of fact to say that I was on Japanese television long before I ever watched it. The circumstances of our engagement (which, for the uninitiated, was a very public proclamation involving the purchase of a local television commercial and, on my part at least, a great deal of screaming) meant…
Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
by Geraldine DeRuiter
Available Now!
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