Essays

For the first time in my life, I was not looking outside of myself for validation. I wasn’t troubled by anyone else’s opinion about who I was, or what I…

It took months of distance to give myself permission to shape the experience into words. To own the right to my story—the story of my ordinary heart, scarred from decades-old…

Although there is no singular defining reason why one experiences writing as meaningful or fulfilling, it surely grants us the unique chance to pry ourselves open on the page, bleed…

I cannot imagine what would have become of me or my story if I were not able to capture it in writing. My children and children’s children will be able…

Toby sometimes seems like an interruption, a reminder that I never can go back to who I’ve been before, making me fear that I’ll never finish these stories based on…

Jackson’s demons were clearly bigger and more terrifying than the conventional ones of balancing writing and childrearing. Yet she managed to give space and import to those smaller moments of…

But over the last year or so, no matter how engaging the book, I could never get through more than two or three pages before he’d decide that was enough.

I had driving questions: How much caregiving can any one woman do without breaking down? Why do women seem so often to be the caregivers? What becomes of us when…

Just when I think I have all my essays dressed and ready, I’ll discover that one isn’t actually ready at all—and another is wandering off.

For me I realized, Jolabokaflod was an extension of a language I had been speaking with both passion and conviction my whole life. Jolabokaflod is about speaking book.

But that morning, I felt something sweeter than being needed. My little girl was taking wing and exploring her way through a world of images and words, independent of me.