In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point.
It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are.
I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.
In a world of oversharing, we don't want to be unknown or unseen. We don't want to be left out.
Handwriting challenges aside, I love paper cards. I love the endless stewing involved in picking them out at the store. I love buying holiday stamps at the post office, and I love that 'whoosh' sound the cards make when I drop them into the mail slot.
For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.
Obviously, nobody chooses not to have kids because they'd rather sleep in late. It's a very visceral decision, and it's a complicated decision.
I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.
Quitting Facebook would be like partially erasing myself. Quitting Twitter would constitute further erasure. Pretty soon, I'd be invisible. I was never on Instagram or Tumblr, which I guess means I never completely existed in the first place.
Just as I never liked bumper stickers - even though I do brake for animals, and if I had a kid, she would definitely be an honor student - I don't like the idea of expressing my views through social-media-controlled rainbow-or-anything-else-ification.
I was just 13 when 'The Big Chill' was released in late September 1983, so I didn't catch all of its nuances when I sneaked into the theater to see it. But I could tell one thing for sure: These people were grown-ups.
I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes.
Each year, in my quaint efforts to send out paper holiday cards with personal messages, I probably discard one for every three I actually manage to put in the mail. The reason is that my handwriting is now less legible than it was when I was in the second grade.
I am weary of happiness, both as a word and as a concept.
Becoming a parent is always going to be a default setting. I truly believe there will always be more people who want to have children than who don't.
A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell.
Opinion is dominating, which is absolutely ridiculous - there wouldn't be anything for people to have opinions about if there weren't people out there gathering facts on the ground.
When I made my final reckoning with the decision not to have kids, I also decided that I would use at least some of my extra time to better the lives of kids who are already here.
It's not that I don't get on bandwagons; I just climb aboard only after most of the band has packed up and left for the next gig.
I've been a freelancer my entire career, and, at any given time, I have several deadlines for all sorts of things, whether it's some magazine piece or ad copywriting or anything.
