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The Awl: The Book?

I’ve written for many wonderful publications and editors, but I’ve never loved writing for any place as much as I loved writing for The Awl.

If you, like me, miss going there every day to read their latest, you might be dismayed to know that their archives are no longer on the site (thus the lack of a link) but also relieved to know that thanks to Flaming Hydra, you can help preserve Awl and Hairpin archives and contribute to the creation of an Awl book! If it’s fully funded, the book will be edited by my dear brilliant friend Carrie Frye. Yes please times one billion.


Art & Kinship: Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s The Tree Doctor

My latest Art & Kinship installment is on Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s second novel, The Tree Doctor, and her work more broadly. Also, death, ghosts, sex, and a cherry tree named Einstein. Here’s how it begins: I first encountered Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s work in her engaging, quietly profound, and beautifully and wryly observed Letter From a Japanese Crematorium, written soon after her grandmother’s funeral. . . .

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Taking T for Jesus

My latest essay, “Taking T for Jesus,” on the transphobic evangelicals hawking hormones, and also developments closer to home, is up from The Baffler today. Here’s how it starts: A few years ago, my then-eighty-year-old mom started taking testosterone to improve her health and sex life. As with most of her major life decisions, she got the idea from a . . .

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Art & Kinship: Garrard Conley’s All the World Beside

My latest newsletter is on Boy Erased author Garrard Conley’s first novel, All the World Beside, a singular and magnificent work of art: tender, hopeful, shot through with dour fundamentalist judgment and a painful sense of separation, but also numinous and earthly connection. Also considered: the sins of the fathers, Puritan ancestors, epigenetics, queer kinship, and the musicality of his prose.

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