contact improv

I was nervous around people before being nervous around people was cool. Naturally, that means that just as social anxiety becomes a status symbol, I’m suddenly brave enough to scare the shit out of a 24-year-old at Broadway Dance Center by staring her down at the end of contemporary class… I’m not waiting anymore. I’m not waiting to go back to normal and I’m not waiting to become a shameless and unembarrassed person. More

2023 in books

Wow, I’ve only written one post since I wrote my 2022 in books. Sorry! I know nobody on the Internet has anything better to do than wait around to hear what I have to say about cooking or the decline of public discourse. I’ve been too busy working on my novel and ghostwriting op-eds in…More

hot dog fingers

Author’s Note: I started writing this post before “Everything Everywhere All At Once” came out, but fret not, I can bring it around to Jamie Lee Curtis playing the piano with her toes. Wait for it… “You can either have constipation and dry mouth, or tingling fingers and hair loss,” my doctor says. “Oh, and…More

2022 in books

I was going to make this an annual thing after doing it in 2020, but then I forgot to do it in 2021, but this year I learned about the Costa Book Award and was reinvigorated! The article where I learned about this prize describes the award as “[pitting] novels, children’s books, biographies, and poetry…More

there’s no place like life outside your apartment

The other week I went full Churchill on one of my more Covid-shy friends, trying to talk her down from worrying about catching Covid at a distant cousin’s wedding. You know the drill: We shall not flag or fail, we shall dive maskless onto the dance floor. Life is short, and who knows how many…More

my own private dave coulier

I caught Covid last December. Around the same time I sank into a profound depression. The depression was easier to source; it was dark in London every day before four, I hadn’t seen a friend in person in months, and the thrill had long gone out of changing your Zoom background to the most salacious…More

pandora’s storage unit

Which, I think, is why I pulled the rope ladder out of the well and put the cover on with you down inside there that time, kind of like sealing you off. That way, there would be no more Mr. Wind-Up Bird around, and I wouldn’t have to be bothered by those thoughts for a…More

i finally got something right

9 years ago I had a degree in English and a job selling ballet shoes for barely above minimum wage. I had left Vassar the year before assuming that a job would make its way to me in the way jobs did in the books I grew up reading, in which smart people made livings…More

if i could only make me better

In the spring of 2010, not long before my college dance company’s annual gala at the local opera house, I borked something deep in my hip. The gala took place each year in the dead of upstate New York winter, which meant that there was always a spate of injuries right before, mostly slip-and-falls down…More

heaven is other people

Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung. People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists, as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and…More