My college boyfriend introduced me to Joan Didion. He gave me his dog-eared paperback of Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I remember turning to the picture of Joan on the back, young and pretty and serious. I remember the poetic allusion of the title that was lost on me, because I never read poetry.  “I really think . . . Read More

The Lonesome Dove miniseries rolled into town in 1989, when I was fourteen years old.* Back in the before-times of the late Eighties, computers were clunky green-screened things known to your serious nerd variety, and the television was the center of the household. We built cabinets around our televisions, we kept drawers underneath it,  in . . . Read More

part 4 of a 10-part series Gather round, young Snapchat and TikTok fans, and attend the tale of GEN X IRONY. The year was 2000. We used our phones for talking. Each time you logged on the Internet — which we called the “World Wide Web,” a phrase that was like sprinkling glitter from your . . . Read More

Part 3 of a 10-part series I was 22 or 23. I was in Boston visiting my college roommate Tara Copp, who had an internship at the Globe. I was killing an afternoon by myself, and I was hungover, because I was always hungover, so I was wandering through a book store when the title . . . Read More

In the spring of 2001, I decided to start my own website. Actually, I decided to quit my job at the Austin paper, travel to Ecuador to learn Spanish, and also start my own website, where I planned to share stories of my adventures. I didn’t like the idea of spamming my friend circle with . . . Read More

I wish I could remember how she came to me, what detail opened the door that I would walk through to meet her. Did we have a friend in common? Did she name-drop some magazine? This would have been 2011, or thereabouts, and my inbox was a game of whack-a-mole, where the moles were always . . . Read More

Years ago, when I was finishing my first book, I got a solid piece of advice. Write your second book while waiting for the first to publish. A book often takes a year to go from final draft to bookshelf, and in that lag time, anxiety blossoms. Writing a second one fast, soon, now would . . . Read More

Five and a half years ago, I started thinking I could write a book. Actually, I’d been thinking I could write a book since I learned it was a Thing You Could Do. A decent montage of my 20s and early 30s would be me, doing different things, wondering if they might become books. This . . . Read More

Last night I ran into an old friend, and she was like: Where can I find all the things you’ve written lately? I asked if she was on Facebook, and she was like, no I don’t do that, and I was like, YOU ARE SO SMART, and then I was like, but wait, where CAN you . . . Read More

In my senior year of college, I took a playwriting class. We were given slips of paper with dramatic scenarios and told to write a few pages of a scene. It’s been nearly two decades since I read the information on that strip of paper, selected from a pile, and though I cannot be certain, . . . Read More