A deep look inside the byzantine subculture of high-school debate — and the misogyny and toxic behavior that lurked therein — from a onetime participant. Heart-stopping and eye-opening. Boys who were strong debaters were said to possess Good Debater Syndrome, meaning that their skill made them seem more attractive to their female peers. For girls, […]
Memoirs
Posted inStory
Judge a Book Not By its Gender
Lisa Whittington-Hill suggests there’s a distinct gender bias in celebrity memoirs. Where female celebrities are expected to expose all, male writers get to write about whatever they want.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Story
The Light Years
After his parents pushed him out of their home, a teenager descended into the drug-fueled counterculture of the 1970s American West.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Profiles & Interviews
Arranging Your Body in Space: Talking Identity, Memoir, and Twins with Leah Dieterich
“One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins,” Leah Dieterich writes in her memoir, “but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.” This concept of a vanishing twin, a term coined in the year of Dieterich’s birth, frames the […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
Viv Albertine on Dating Again in Her 50s
In my teens I was upset that I was too young to go out with any of the boys in my favorite bands. Now they’re all with women who weren’t even born when I had that thought.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
A Certain Kind of Mammal
Meaghan O’Connell on the joy, the triumph, and the prison of breastfeeding.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Story, Unapologetic Women
The Thing about Women from the River Is That Our Currents Are Endless
Given a journal while hospitalized, Terese Marie Mailhot writes her way through generations of trauma.
Posted inFirst Chapters, Nonfiction
One Man’s Quest For His Vinyl and His Past
Motivated by seller’s regret and nostalgia, a journalist goes in search of the vinyl of his youth. And not just copies of albums he loved—he wants the exact records he owned and sold.
Posted inFirst Chapters, Nonfiction, Story
One Man’s Quest For His Vinyl and His Past
Motivated by seller’s regret and nostalgia, a journalist goes in search of the vinyl of his youth. And not just copies of albums he loved—he wants the exact records he owned and sold.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
The Cost of Telling Your Truth, Publicly
Jillian Lauren on the challenges of holding nothing back as a writer—about her time in a harem, her life as a sex worker, and the fallout from her family’s response to her memoirs.