Dressing Is Manifesting: Style Advice That’s Also Life Advice

Donna was always dressed. She wore what was appropriate for the hour of the day. She dressed for dinner. She liked well-tailored boys’ suits. If you went to her room at four A.M.—she was an insomniac—you’d find her sitting at her desk, smoking a cigarette, wearing a perfectly pressed white shirt buttoned to the top, […]

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Back in my Body

A love letter to running and to Maggie Rogers. On a particularly bleak day at the end of March, having been furloughed and in the grip of pandemic panic, I very dramatically did not get out of bed for an entire day or open the curtains, in the manner of an Edwardian society lady with […]

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My Beautiful Ugly Face

I need an author photo for my book. It’s a request I knew was coming. I had one photo I thought could work, the one I use for this email, the one Jay, my husband, took last year with his new professional camera and because it was in our apartment with its white walls, I […]

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Hope Is A Religious Thing

On Tuesday, on my daily government-allowed walk, I went around the park instead of towards the canal and turned a couple of wrong turns. I walked some more and stopped right in front of a church that I’d never noticed around the neighborhood before. Partly hidden by foliage, mostly drenched in the atypical April sunshine […]

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How To Build Your Own World In A Broken One

And if you can’t survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own. – Jeanette Winterson Day 30 of quarantine, Friday night was not a good night for me. In fact, all of last week was difficult. Outwardly, I probably appeared on edge, irritable, maybe a little drunk, but inside, I […]

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The Best Online Workouts To Keep You Sane

There is a holiness to exhaustion –Carrie Fountain A few months ago I was talking to a friend about our high school days. Remember when we used to go to school at like seven in the morning, sit through seven hours of classes, then two hours of hockey practice, go home, complete our homework, then […]

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The Best Opening Lines Of My Favorite Books

What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. – Joan Didion  I’m not someone who reads the back of books. I’ve been told by […]

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