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True Romantic #17: Ripping Free
By Christmas 2003, Adam hadn’t seen his father for over a year. Sam and I agreed that it was time for a visit, and so I bought tickets back to the Midwest for the holidays. In the past year, Sam had...
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True Romantic #18: A Particularly American Belief
I’d waited for months to see pages from Marius’s first book in English and, when he finally gave it to me, I read it all in one sitting. It was brilliant, with all of his humor and energy, his...
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The Rumpus Interview with Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff is not a woman of if, but rather of when. She’s the type of person who believes in the greater good, whose achievements reflect the enormous efforts she exerts to find kindness and insight...
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True Romantic #19: A Heavy Weight
We set about applying for MFA programs. I showed him the online applications for some of the best creative writing programs: Iowa, Michigan, Columbia, Brown, Cornell. The applications were on the...
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The Rumpus Interview with Karolina Waclawiak
When I recently went to the Los Angeles launch of Karolina Waclawiak’s newest novel The Invaders, I was intrigued by her thoughts on how women are devalued as they age. That said, I was a little...
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Little Yellow Footballs
There are 86,400 seconds in a day. During this time, the Earth travels approximately 93 million miles through space at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour. The average human heart beats 100,000 times....
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Proof of Passage
The day of the passports was, for all appearances, ordinary. I like to think that other people’s children, at the most random provocation, take to tears and defiant tantrums, even if the post office...
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The Ways We Speak
In the 1998 Flower Valley Elementary production of Peter Pan, I was cast as J.M. Barrie’s mute American Indian Tiger Lily, daughter of the Chieftain Great Big Little Panther, who is captured by the...
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The Rumpus Interview with Kate Bolick
Kate Bolick’s recent book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, has caught fire in an unlikely way, defining the national conversation. A New York Times bestseller, this hybrid text straddles two...
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True Romantic #20: A Demon in the House
Marius was accepted into the Fiction Writing MFA at Brown University and, in the summer of 2005, we moved to Providence, Rhode Island. It was good news for our family. Not only would Marius be going to...
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The Last Book I Loved: Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living In New York
When I was a teenager, I slid a yellowing paperback off my mother’s shelf, read it in one sitting, and have carried it around with me like a talisman ever since. The book was Sheila Levine is Dead and...
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True Romantic #21: Brick by Brick
The village was called Aubais, pronounced like “obey”, as in love, honor, and Aubais. I found the village by looking online. I’d typed the words South of France rentals into a search engine and clicked...
View ArticleDefining America through Marriage
At Marginalia, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Darryl W. Stephens reviews a new history of 19th century marriage by Leslie Harris. Harris’s book documents the ways public rhetoric and...
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The Rumpus Interview with Sandra and Ben Doller
I first came across Sandra and Ben Doller’s work as an editor for Essay Press. We published a weeklong excerpt from a complete project, which came out this August. The full thirty-two days will be...
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True Romantic #22: Far Away From the Real World
During our first weeks in Aubais, I took the kids to the boulangerie every morning. At that time of the day, the village was always swarming with old women doing their daily shopping. Baskets in hand,...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Grow
People tell me I’ve got a green thumb. They ask me for tips on keeping their own houseplants alive. Bring them to me when they start to wilt and conveniently never take them back. I’ve started checking...
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True Romantic #23: As If It Was a Warning
After the move to France, Marius started wearing all black—black jeans, black t-shirt, black socks, black hat—so that it seemed to me that he’d materialized from the shade of our micocoulier, the...
View ArticleDiamonds & Rust #3: Let’s Revel in This Messy Splendor
As my marriage fell apart I lived directly above a busy wedding venue. The week my divorce became official I moved into a small three bedroom with a front porch view of a large cemetery.This opening...
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The Saturday Rumpus Review: Carol
In an early scene of Carol, lonely department store clerk Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) begins her shift in the quiet darkness of a store soon mobbed by shoppers. The decorations are chintzy but warm:...
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Greyhound
Stephanie Anderson’s “Greyhound” was selected by Emily Rapp as the winner of the second annual Payton Prize, which seeks to honor one excellent nonfiction essay each year in memory of Payton James...
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