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Power and Consent in Brown America
In my fifth-grade year, I wore a bracelet made of shells gifted to me by an older cousin who knew how to navigate American fashion. I was in art class when a girl next to me asked to see it—a girl who...
View ArticleTarnished, Shiny Exteriors: Kate Braverman’s A Good Day for Seppuku
Kate Braverman’s latest story collection, A Good Day For Seppuku, out now from City Lights, offers eight precisely written stories examining the commonplace struggles of modern upper-middle class life....
View ArticleMothering Our Children and Ourselves: Molly Caro May’s Body Full of Stars
If you’re not a mother and not planning to become one, you may think Molly Caro May’s memoir, Body Full of Stars: Female Rage and My Passage into Motherhood, has nothing to do with you. If you have a...
View ArticleENOUGH: Please Have a Seat
ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women and non-binary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and...
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The Medically Misguided Approach to Mistreatment
In 2013, I entered medical school, fresh out of the incubator of all-girls school education and liberal arts college. Given the bubble I grew up in—“empower a girl to serve and shape our world” was...
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Black Panther and Strong Women
Like a lot of American women growing up in the fat free-soaked 1990s, I put myself on my first diet when I was in elementary school. Even though I’m black, I’ve assumed a role in the general American...
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The Violence of Women: Talking with Amber Tamblyn
Amber Tamblyn’s new book Any Man imagines a vicious upside down world, where men are preyed upon by a female serial rapist. But the book transcends the gimmick of the experiment and digs deeper into...
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The Genius and the Nobody: Lynne Tillman’s Men and Apparitions
There are girl girls and boy girls and boy boys and girl boys, I once heard Eileen Myles tell Lynne Tillman. You, she said, are a masculine writer. (I’m paraphrasing.) The two of them were discussing...
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A Two-Hour Dance Class in Thirty Minutes
It was late August in New York and the summer was evaporating faster than the rainwater from the deluge that pummeled the city the evening before. The air was thick and miserable with humidity. Midtown...
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FUNNY WOMEN: What Does It Mean When a Girl Is Quiet?
Quiet girls have long been a mystery to men and to the world itself and did I mention to men. What does it mean when a girl is being quiet around you, not verbally acknowledging your presence? What is...
View ArticleHard to Swallow: Allie Rowbottom’s Jell-O Girls
Allie Rowbottom’s debut memoir and family history, Jell-O Girls, opens with her spooning Jell-O into her dying mother’s mouth. It’s ironic, given their family history, that Jell-O is the only thing her...
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Naked in Japan
I handed the bathhouse attendant some yen then followed the color-coded signs for the women’s section. Inside, the walls were lined with metal lockers and there were no curtains, no changing areas....
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #150: Catherine Lacey
With the publication of her first novel Nobody Is Ever Missing in 2014, Catherine Lacey’s evocative depictions of modern life established her as a powerful voice in fiction. A native of Mississippi,...
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Honest Work with Language: Talking with Berta García Faet
Berta García Faet and I had an intense two-year working relationship and friendship before we finally met in person earlier this year, when I was living briefly in Spain. Most of our correspondence as...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #160: Kimberly Dark
A hybrid of culture critique, magical realism, and BDSM, Kimberly Dark’s The Daddies (Brill, October 2018) is a kaleidoscopic love letter to masculinity. Though The Daddies tells the story of one...
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Lilies of the Valley
The first time someone tried to seduce me, I was twenty-one and so shy that I didn’t realize a seduction was happening until I was right in the thick of it. I’d gone for dinner at the house of a man...
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Making It
I was early to the breastfeeding group and decided to sit on a couch and nurse Samson before anyone else arrived. When my son slipped off my nipple into a nap in my arms, I realized I needed to pee....
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Spotlight: “Girl’s Guide to Personal Hygiene and Cell Decay”
What’s it like to be hairy? How does it feel to be thirty? Is it possible to stop and smell the flowers? Find answers to these questions and more in “Girl’s Guide to Personal Hygiene and Cell Decay,” a...
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Truth through Fiction: Talking with Nicole Dennis-Benn
To say that Nicole Dennis-Benn is highly accomplished as a writer is an understatement. Her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, received titles of best book of the year from the New York Times, NPR,...
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The Desire to Be: Talking with Garrard Conley and Taylor Larsen
On first reading Garrard Conley’s memoir Boy Erased, recounting his experience of shifting familial alliances while he underwent highly traumatic gay conversion therapy, a story now receiving attention...
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