Archive

Essays

Once upon a time, I was trying to tell a story, only I didn’t know how it went. There wasn’t a main character, there wasn’t an adventure, and when I tried to begin the story I just disappeared into one thing after another. “Happily ever after”—after what?

I was trying to tell a story about motherhood, and each time I set out from home I got lost in the woods…

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When I became a mother, it was the most grown-up thing I’d ever done. By age 33 I’d held down jobs and signed a book contract. I’d moved to a new city for the man I loved. The two of us had bought a refrigerator. The two of us had bought a refrigerator. But having a baby was clearly a vastly larger acquisition. It felt like a powerful act of self-definition. So why had I not taken charge of my life so much as lost my way in it?

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My beloved friend Krishna–who first introduced me to Born in Flames, the 1983 feminist science fiction film by Lizzie Borden–asked me to be on a panel on the film in the Samen Tegen Racisme (Together Against Racism) series, Pakhuis de Zwijger, November 20, 2020. I appeared together with Gina Lafour, Shishani Vranckx, and moderator Manjit […]

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“I was surprised—though I shouldn’t have been—to discover that a book on mothering was also about not-mothering. Yet the problem of an unplanned pregnancy, for women born between 1900 and 1945, is a story that runs throughout my book. Of the women I’m writing about, almost all struggled for access to birth control. Several had […]

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Grievance, paranoia, and Ian Buruma Many observers in the Dutch press had a hard time understanding the fall of Ian Buruma. My explanation was published in Dutch in Letter&Geest on September 29, 2018. Ian Buruma is out. Our man in New York, the Dutchman who made his name in the English-speaking world with insightful books […]

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Sometime between October 9 and 14, 1797—let’s call it the second Monday in October—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as he was walking on the coast in southwest England, became ill and stopped to rest at a remote farm. An image had been tugging at his attention, from a seventeenth-century traveler’s tale about China. In this unfamiliar house, […]

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Jonathan Franzen is a little like Times Square, the Eiffel Tower, or a Dutch windmill. If you’re a local, you can protest all you want that he’s not the only sight worth seeing, that you know other, less touristy spots, that there’s more to our great country than this one monument that’s on all the postcards. The foreign visitors won’t be satisfied until they’ve been there.

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It’s rare to find a woman writer who is directly inspired or enabled by her experience as a mother. Although I would like to believe that parents have a direct line to the deepest levels of human meaning, I suspect that most of the time parenting and writing, when they’re not actively interfering with each […]

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“What is art good for?” This question is often asked but seldom convincingly answered. It could be that the query itself doesn’t make much sense. What is sex good for? At a guess, humans don’t make art because it’s useful. We paint, write, read, look, listen, make music because it’s what we do. Imagination is […]

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