It’s not a surprise that I love to read. I go through phases, though, where I don’t read much. I’m not sure why. Last summer I read mostly magazines and Mary Oliver poems. For the last month or so I’ve read very little, probably because I’ve been so consumed with work. I’m slowly starting to [...]
I suspected I was going to enjoy A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood by Lisa Catherine Harper. I didn’t, however, imagine that I’d devour it almost in one sitting. I adored Harper’s book: it is full of careful, scientific details that were new to me, it is written in eloquent, beautiful prose, and more than once [...]
I have been a Peggy Orenstein fan for a long time. Years ago I wrote about her now-famous New York Times article called “What’s Wrong With Cinderella?“ I also read and adored both Flux and Waiting for Daisy. Schoolgirls is next on my list. I have read several reviews of her new book, Cinderella Ate [...]
I’ve been steering my life from my bed for three days now, with this nasty high-fever-flu-yuck. It feels right to repost what I wrote a year ago today, when I was beginning the book that would change my life: Dani Shapiro‘s Devotion. Incidentally, Glenda pointed out that my post last week about Rodin’s Cathedral was [...]
I am delighted to be included in an upcoming anthology of essays called Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood. I’ve read a bunch of the essays, and they are smart, funny, wise, and touching. The authors are a broad array of women who have in common that they are [...]
Claire Dederer’s memoir, Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, is grounded in the fact that she grew up in the 70s. I did too, and I related intensely to both Dederer’s granular details and her overriding tropes. Given that she grew up with separated parents in Seattle and I grew up with married parents [...]
My mother and father had been to Switzerland, traveling in the Engadine. When they got back, my mother told me this story. While walking in the mountains, they had come upon a small church, and a sign outside said it had been dedicated at the time of Charlemagne. She said it was the first time [...]
Grace and I have been reading Harry Potter together for almost a year now. I read all seven books as soon as they came out, thoroughly enchanted by the world that JK Rowling created, and it’s been wonderful to revisit the story with Grace. Last December I wrote about how moved I was to reconsider [...]
I read Dominique Browning’s beautiful memoir, Slow Love, this weekend. Just last week I wrote about discovering her blog, Slow Love Life, and feeling as though I’d tumbled into an alternative universe filled with my own preoccupations, just far more gorgeously expressed. The book gave me the same feeling: it was as though my most [...]
My mother and I went to hear Mary Oliver read last night. She read in the chapel at Wellesley College, which was full to capacity – hundreds of people, standing room only. Katrina had described Mary Oliver as “elfin” to me and she is. Tiny and sparkling at the same time, wearing plain black, she [...]
