Personal Essays

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A Moment of Grace in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

At its heart, like so many of Flannery O’Connor’s stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a story about error at the level of perception, about a confrontation with reality, and the grace that can enter a human heart when a person is stripped down to nothing.

Can Twitter Make Trauma Generic? And If So, What Should We Do About It?

Can Twitter Make Trauma Generic? And If So, What Should We Do About It?

As a writer, I’ve been thinking about the importance of our trauma—the needle-pushing trauma of the #MeToo movement, of the interrogation of “post-truth,” of the existential crisis necessary for confronting something like climate change, or the stories beyond the body counts of the drug war in Mexico.

A Mother’s Work and Rachel Sherman’s Uneasy Street: the Anxieties of Affluence

A Mother’s Work and Rachel Sherman’s Uneasy Street: the Anxieties of Affluence

Spending less time working and more time with our children was a choice that was entirely in our control. We realized that most people didn’t have a choice—they either went back to work quickly after their children were born or quit their jobs in favor of full-time parenthood.