Tag: sixth grade
The Women of Rural America Are Dying Too Young
“Boy crazy” was what people called it. “She was so boy crazy,” I would hear about my girlfriends. I never heard the reverse, that a boy was “girl crazy.” Girls having crushes, sneaking out at night to have fun: It seems innocent enough. But in my small, conservative town, a “wrong” choice at a young age could cut girls off from their future dreams, leaving them mired in despair.
Growing up in the ’90s in Clinton, Arkansas, all that
We Still Need Judy Blume
Like tens of thousands of young women before me, I wrote to Judy Blume because something strange was happening to my body.
I had just returned from visiting the author in Key West when I noticed a line of small, bright-red bites running up my right leg. I was certain it was bedbugs—and terrified that I’d given them to Blume, whose couch I had been sitting on a few days earlier.
The Things I’m Afraid to Write About
One evening, I sat on the brown-leather couch of a younger man who admired me for my writing, and maybe other things, if the salty text messages were true. He came from a different generation, but I was pleased to discover that he shared many of my unconventional opinions and favorite authors, that taste and perspective weren’t necessarily a matter of the year you were born. Joan Didion, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, though I had more reservations about that last