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Do I Have the Right to Inhabit Another’s Mental Illness in Fiction?
My mother had bipolar disorder. So did her father. While I do not, I recently wrote a novel in which one of the main characters has bipolar disorder. I did my best to imagine myself into his mind. I...
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Dear Rick Moody: What Should I Say About My Scars?
Dear Rick Moody, Life Coach, I tend to be a fairly private person. Twelve years ago, at the age of 31, I was in a very stressful situation in my life. My mother had become angry with her parents when...
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Hanging Out with the Italian Neo-Fascists Who Idolize Ezra Pound
A couple of years ago, I went to Italy to visit a gang of neo-fascist Ezra Pound fans who I’d seen mentioned in horrified newspaper articles and couldn’t quite believe really existed. It was spring in...
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Confronting Anxiety Through Baseball
Baseball is not a sport for the anxious. Unlike basketball or hockey, it’s impossible for any one player to get lost in the crowd. In that way, baseball is a solitary endeavor. Players stand at their...
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Mental Illness is Not a Capital Crime
Two and a half decades after the 1991 beating of Rodney King was broadcast on TV, another bystander captured video of a different beating by the side of a Los Angeles freeway, featuring another Black...
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Do I Have the Right to Inhabit Another’s Mental Illness in Fiction?
My mother had bipolar disorder. So did her father. While I do not, I recently wrote a novel in which one of the main characters has bipolar disorder. I did my best to imagine myself into his mind. I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dear Rick Moody: What Should I Say About My Scars?
Dear Rick Moody, Life Coach, I tend to be a fairly private person. Twelve years ago, at the age of 31, I was in a very stressful situation in my life. My mother had become angry with her parents when...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hanging Out with the Italian Neo-Fascists Who Idolize Ezra Pound
A couple of years ago, I went to Italy to visit a gang of neo-fascist Ezra Pound fans who I’d seen mentioned in horrified newspaper articles and couldn’t quite believe really existed. It was spring in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Avoid the Pathways to Psychic Pain
David Foster Wallace had a cavity. He’d never had one before—but now the dentist who’d always praised him for his pristine teeth was telling the 14-year-old boy that he was not invulnerable. “I...
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How a Self-Published Writer of Gay Erotica Beat Sci-Fi’s Sad Puppies at their...
When I was a little kid, my mother would come into the bedroom I shared with two of my sisters each night and read us a book before we slept. Inevitably, a minor fight would erupt over whose bed beside...
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Shelter in Place
We are at The Owl. Tess out on the floor, Seymour running his door, and me, I’m working my bar. It’s crowded with students, this the night before spring break begins. An Emerson tradition, one last...
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Why Do We Love Watching Women Self-Destruct?
Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Whitney Houston, Britney Spears—they were all women whose personal scandals overshadowed, and sometimes swallowed entirely, their own artistry. “Women who...
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