I don’t know when the idea for this year’s Halloween costume originated. Rand and I have been talking about it for years. It’s the sort of thing that stays simmering on the back burner for so long that you almost have to wonder if it’ll ever come to fruition, or if the idea will simply…
My beloved wrote a book. How it came to be was radically different from my own path. When I wrote a book, it became a job, it became the thing I was doing because on a daily basis, there’s not that much else that is asked of me. But there are always things asked of…
“Why do they have so many copies of my book? Is that a bad sign? Does that mean no one’s buying it?” “No. Your book has been out for a year, and they have a lot of copies. That’s a good sign. That means they keep it in stock.” “Are you sure? Because doesn’t it…
I don’t know what writer’s block looks like for other people. I’ve never discussed it with my friends who write professionally, perhaps because it seems like a silly, self-indulgent think to talk about. “Hello, friends who also make a living making sentences. Do you know how sometimes the sentences are hard to make? How putting…
My husband and I are driving through southern Oregon, like we have every summer since we were married. I see a Red Lobster. I scream. I tell him to pull over immediately. He ignores me. After more than a decade together he can distinguish between my “something is urgently wrong” scream and my “I need…
I have an excellent memory. In the aftermath of my brain surgery, my biggest fear was that my ability to recount past events was damaged in some way. Under the haze of anesthesia, I walked around the park near our old home with Rand, struggling to piece together the last few days. I’d struggled through…
When I got home, I cried. Finally. Rand hugged me, wore that same worried look he gets on his face when something goes wrong and he’s not there for it. For a long time I wondered what it was about me that meant the second I went on a trip on my own, things started…
Over the last week, I have watched the entire Fast and the Furious series. The impetus for embarking on such an artistically dubious project was a promise that I made years ago to my husband, probably while drunk. I told him that the next time I was struck with the sort of mind-numbing illness that…
When I was 23, a few weeks after Kill Bill premiered, I dressed up as Uma Thurman’s character from the film for Halloween. In it, she wears a yellow jumpsuit that is itself an homage to Bruce Lee’s outfit in Game of Death. I searched for weeks for something similar, and finally found a pair of…
Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
by Geraldine DeRuiter
Available Now!
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