Briana Wall

It’s hard to let go of my instinct to fix myself when the opposite has so often shown me a path forward, or been celebrated. But it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that taking care of myself means knowing when to push versus trust, fight versus surrender. So many modern schools of thought seem to want to nudge us toward one or the other—perhaps... See more

I keep thinking of a conversation I had last month with Caroline O’Donoghue, the brilliant author of The Rachel Incident . We were talking about the route she took to writing the book, and the prevalence of Irish authors in pop culture. She stopped the wandering conversation in the way you do when you want someone to be very clear about how things... See more

Leo leaned back in his stool, swishing melted ice around his glass, detective-style. “My ex-girlfriends are girlfriends to someone very different to me,” he said. “The versions of us that dated are a memory-version of me and her.”

“That’s exactly it! Your exes are these sort of time-capsules.”