Early on I learned that if I could wear the right clothes, look the right way, at least in part, I could pass as normal. When my best friend Emily was pregnant with her first child, she was very sick, most notably during a Globe Theater performance, which she valiantly sat through in order to […]
Trump believes he will never experience an accident, diagnosis, or any indignities related to age. He thinks his money will insulate him from chaos, from these eventualities. One is left to wonder how he will look back on his recent antics and regret them. The title says it all. Donald Trump’s book Crippled America: How […]
I understood that I was, emotionally speaking, standing naked in front of the Internet, and that plenty of people wished I’d cover up. In Boston, the last of the leaves are turning brown and brittle, dappling the sidewalks of Jamaica Plain. My daughter, almost 2, crunches and kicks them with her sneakers on our way […]
Let’s see who we are and like what we see. Enough already. I love glossy women’s magazines. I’ve always loved clothes, and shoes, and beautiful objects beautifully shot. Of course, as a teenager growing up with an artificial leg, I never saw my body reflected in magazines like Sassy or Seventeen, but at the time […]
The love for what I’ve lost magnifies the love for what is now. Every day as I love this baby in my lap, I think of my other baby. Poor older brother, poor missing one…The love for the first magnifies the love for the second, and vice versa. – Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of […]
She was a beautiful woman, long legs, lovely face, curvy figure—why couldn’t she see it? Why couldn’t she see beauty in me? My grandmother’s funeral was last week, in a small town in Illinois where a gaggle of sad looking geese huddled together for warmth on a frozen lake in front of a church on […]
Enough with this sexist stereotype. The majority of my experiences with girls and women has been positive, even life affirming. In 1988, when I was in eighth grade, I contracted an eye infection and wasn’t able to wear my contact lenses. At the time, my eyeglass lenses were inches thick—just like the proverbial Coke bottles—and […]
Be beautiful, be sexy, be active, be nurturing, be domestic, be focused on everyone else, and by God, make it all look effortless. What is a good woman? What constitutes goodness and who is the arbiter of the standards that would indicate goodness? If women take their cues about how to “be,” either good or […]
When people talk about the way my daughter is “built,” how beautiful she is, it makes me afraid for her. Will she grow up to think that really matters? I am the mother of a daughter. If I think about this long enough, it terrifies me. How will I help her navigate a world that […]
What do you do when you realize you’ve spent most of your life searching for exactly what you have now? For the last six weeks, I’ve been on the road with my baby daughter, Charlotte, who will be five months old in early August. Babies, it turns out, travel with about 10 times their weight […]
There is beauty and terror in every aspect of life worth pursuing, says Emily Rapp. never thinking this would cost you anything, never imagining the sound of my voice as anything but part of you— you won’t hear it in the other world, not clearly again, not in birdcall or human cry, not […]
A day supposedly designed for love is not just about so-called romantic love, but about all the ways in which the people we know both trigger and support our great changes as we move through the chaos and tangle of life experience, says Emily Rapp. On Valentine’s Day 1998, I was sitting in my office […]
