In a 2003 interview with writer and cultural critic Hilton Als, Toni Morrison rejects the idea that labeling her work as “female” or “Black” narrows it or limits its reach and accessibility because “being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.

The American Dream remains defined by whiteness and masculinity, no matter who occupies the role; our most rewarded and celebrated leaders, even if they are not…

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And it made me a little heartbroken to be newly aware of what’s possible but absent from the world I regularly live in.

It’s in communities like the ones you’ll read about in this book that we can find proof that another world is not just possible, but is emerging all around us.

“Just think about the way we talk about relationships now,” she said to me. “Significant others—significant means ‘sex partner.’ What a weirdly narrow notion of significant.”

These wounds—the specifically personal and the systemically personal—are intertwined.

We all internalize cultural norms, including the people whose lives are belittled or disregarded because of those standards. And we often do see our choices through the lens of society’s…

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Capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy (all of which create offshoots like ableism, transphobia, ageism, and others) are embedded in the systems and institutions we all interact with—everything from housing to health care to media to jobs to education.1 But they are also embedded in each of us.

Among the sixty-five-plus-and-dating set, “more older women are rejecting the downsides of the live-in relationship: the codependence, the daily tension within close quarters and the sacrifices made keeping a home, caregiving and doing the emotional legwork to keep their unions humming.”12