Sublime

She will, she decides, keep him for the night unless she thinks he’s a genuine danger: she will send nobody back for a bad T-shirt or a haphazard approach to home deodorizing, for cutting his own hair, for rewatching The Wire, for filling the living room with Funko Pops. She does not have the fortitude, tonight, to explore the parameters of the

“Fabicelli’s bakery. Mr. Fabi

All of these mothering fables are careful to edit out the role played by the phalanx of nannies and other help who usually do the bulk of the actual labor of raising children. Mothering in form, not function. They don’t discuss the real secret behind maintaining their work-life balance, mothering as if they don’t have children: it’s undergirded by

I had to start writing. I wrote an almost entire first draft of the book, and it was not good. I wrote it like two and a half times. And I couldn’t get there. There was one moment—I was supposed to have a phone call with the editor one morning. I was so desperate and sad—at my wit’s end, I just didn’t know what to do. The draft I had sent her, she

“I think we all do that, don’t we?” Buck said. “We all, you know, tell stories about ourselves and get attached to the version of us that we think we are. You just made yours public.”

Three morbidly obese hill people on motorized scooters are between me and my morning coffee. Their asses mushroom over the sides of the contraptions, but they still need another Egg McMuffin. There are literally three people, parked in front of me, in line, inside the McDonald’s.

do. You had friends and saw them for dinner. One party hosted and the other brought wine. You discussed current events while the kids watched a movie in a distant room. At the end of the night, you lay in bed talking about the other couple.

Like many girls her age, Maggie is laid out before the world, unafraid, unpopulated. Men come to insert themselves, they turn a girl into a city.