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 . . .
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. . . .
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 . . .
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.
The first subject of my new Art & Kinship series is Emily Raboteau, whose work I’ve been reading with admiration for almost two decades. Her new book—Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse”—is out today. In my latest newsletter, some thoughts on her work broadly and this book in particular, along with photos of Emily and her ancestor wall, and her reflections on creating this memorial to them after the passing of her dad as she wrote.