Aleynah

I call my mother to ask if the emotions I feel are hereditary. My father is on the line, too, but I don’t dare ask the same question. My mother once told me he was hard on me because he saw too much of himself in me. I think of all the times my father explained my outbursts to my mother, the look of arrogance on his face as I reluctantly admitted... See more

To tolerate life , as Gaitskill implores us to do, you first have to actually live in it — get up in the morning, take out the trash, eat breakfast, go to work, get on the train, try not to look too deeply into the faces of the people sitting across from you, walk home, call your parents, pay your rent — and you must do all of this amid... See more

the film’s body horror is an effective metaphor for the torture traps of contemporary feminism and beauty culture, where superficial body positive marketing doesn’t square with an ever-expanding suite of digital and surgical tools for beauty optimization and modification.

Today, everyone and everything is always available, and there’s nothing less sexy than that. There’s no chase. Our phones don’t allow us time to dwell, and they don’t allow us time to yearn. Why force yourself to daydream about the guy you’re seeing when you can easily look at dozens of photographs of him online? Why walk into a store in Soho and... See more

Was I a good partner, or was I a bad partner? Did I hurt him, or did he hurt me? Was the great tragedy of our relationship that we’d been doomed from the start, or that we veered off track somewhere, quietly, imperceptibly, and were too far gone by the time we’d realized it? On some days, I was certain that he hadn’t loved me enough; on others, I... See more

You will not find your true self through a series rational choices and consumptive experiences. Some things are not chosen, they simply are.