Category: Life As We Know It
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On Air Conditioning
Brooklyn, July 2013, 3 a.m.: I’m lying on the floor of my bedroom in nothing but my underwear and a sports bra holding a fan aloft over my face in an attempt to find some form of relief from the heat. I’m no stranger to heat: I grew up in heat worse than this, at…
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Where is Le Métro? (On Moving to New York)
In many ways, I still consider myself a newbie to New York. I had visited the city several times before moving here, sepia-toned weekends full of Central Park rowboats and rooftop prosecco, Broadway shows and hotel room parties and long afternoons at the Strand. So I had a vague sense of what I thought life…
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Like a Hurricane (On Moving to New York)
Anyone who didn’t grow up in New York City has a vision of what they imagine living here is like. New York is probably the most ubiquitous setting for television or movies, inundating decades worth of pop culture and giving us sparkling fantasies of what it’s like to inhabit this fair city. My childhood was…
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Kentucky Seven (My Southern Heritage)
Memphis, TN. 1998. Mom and I have just come back from a trip to Costco and are unloading the back of her fire engine red Suburban or, as my daddy calls it, the tank. Arms full of paper towels and blueberries, she asks me to grab some forgotten item. Laundry detergent, I think. I’m already…
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The Real McCoy (My Southern Heritage)
In my family, I’m the city girl, the one who grew up surrounded by concrete and art and good shopping malls (You’d be surprised how much the caliber of your shopping malls increases when you move to the state’s metropolises, and how much this matters as an adolescent girl). I had cousins in small towns…
Zelda & Scout 