“You’re at a party; you’re on vacation; it’s your lunch break. You feel good, or maybe just bored, or maybe a little reckless, and you scan the room, the beach, the restaurant. You stop scanning. And she winks, or he grins, or they realize you caught them staring and blush awkwardly at their own feet for a thousand years, and when they finally look back up, that’s it.”
“It was a predatory smile that he flashed at us, the rest of his pack, expecting us to become predators with him and start howling along.”
Grieving a friend lost to suicide in childhood, the effects of harmful compulsory masculinity, and looking around at a life that could just barely have been imagined then.
“As I write about my name now, I feel strength, and contentment and comfort and home. I feel more like myself than I ever have before.”
On family, memory, scar tissue, a 1999 Red Sox game, unreliable narrators, and setting the story straight.
The journey to finding and deciding on my real name, Melinda Valdivia Rude, took about four years.
It was so easy to stay in touch until it wasn’t: Until my resentment exceeded my love for her, until her fear exceeded her hope. But the world we made lingers.
This is not as rewarding as that “spice up your marriage” advice columnist promised it would be.
In church that morning, I didn’t see any of that. Instead, I saw the tears you shed the first time you saw me after telling your son that I was spitting in the face of God.
The absolutely true autobiography of a liar.
A girl spends 19 days in rural Tennessee with her girlfriend and her family, takes a million pictures, then tells her whole life story in just under 4,000 words. What’s not to love?
This is a story about the family that I lost and found and almost found at various The Cheesecake Factory restaurants across America.