I go back to Oberlin in the dead of winter to give a “convocation speech” in Finney Chapel, the largest and most historic of campus structures. In a subconscious nod to my college experience I...

But I want to tell my stories, more than that, I have to in order to stay sane.

I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we’d make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened. Then...

A month into the semester, I would start showing up twenty minutes late to class again. The rewards weren’t enough to keep me on task, and life got in the way. My mind wandered to...

But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.

You are mad to be spending the summer in the country, where the days are too quiet and you have so much time to think. In the city you live on Broadway, where the noise...

Remember when you discovered your father owned a book called “How To Disappear and Never Be Found?” You’re sure it was just research for new and creative ways of thinking, for concepts that might apply...

The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.

That is because no one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone’s gonna think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me,...

I’ve never seen Star Wars or The Godfather, so that would be a good excuse for us to spend a bunch of time together.

I’ve always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind,...

Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it’s too late.

The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. I obeyed his commands, sure that I could fulfill this...

But surveying those words I realized they are mine. He is mine to protect. There is so much I’ve shared, and so much that’s been crushed by the sharing. I never mourned it, because it...

And then, on the final day, it was time for the faux Underground Railroad. This is the part that no one believes. “No adult would ever do that,” they say. “You can’t be remembering that...

I understand that you come from a generation of women who had to work hard to be heard, but for you to impugn my feminism and act as though I’m a scourge upon women everywhere,...

When I’m playing a character, I am never allowed to explicitly state the the takeaway message of the scenes I’m performing—after all, part of the dramatic conflict is that the person I’m portraying doesn’t really...

For me, sleep equaled death. How was closing your eyes and losing consciousness any different from death? What separated temporary loss of consciousness from permanent obliteration?

I can feel them. The babies. They’re not crawling all over me. They’re not vomiting in my hair or shrieking. They’re doing perfectly normal baby things, and I’m keeping them alive. But I resent them....

I feel like there are fifty ways it’s my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my...

I always reminded myself that this wasn’t exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren’t they?

Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.

I have only touched one other computer at my friend Marissa’s house, and found the experience disconcerting. There was something sinister about the green letters and numbers that flashed on the screen as the computer...

Here’s what I have to say about being married: someday you will look at him, hating him with every fiber of your being, wishing that he would die the most violent death possible. It will...

Ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put

The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action.

I just don’t want to be around people who don’t hate everything in their life right now.

I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand…

If I had known how much I would miss these sensations I might have experienced them differently, recognized their shabby glamour, respected the ticking clock that defined this entire experience. I would have put aside...

Enjoy going through life as yourself.

Her Brooklyn accent only comes out when she’s angry. This is the best part….I pick at my pancakes while she tells me, simply, “It’s ok to change your mind.” About a feeling, a person, a...