Dec 05, 2018
Why I Turned to Candy-Making as My Family Fell Apart
If I was in the kitchen making candy, usually my mom wasn’t in there screaming or throwing a butter dish at my dad.
If I was in the kitchen making candy, usually my mom wasn’t in there screaming or throwing a butter dish at my dad.
What do we do with language that is steeped in colonial history?
All the fashion rules I learned as a girl were informed by the view that women’s bodies are never okay as they are—they always need fixing.
Sea sponges lack heart, lungs, and the ability to move. They perform their ancient tasks because they must.
Breadmaking made me feel purposeful, instead of feeling as if I scarcely had control over anything.
When Etty wrote to herself, I heard her speaking to me, and I took her words to heart.
Most time capsules are enclosed underground, but this one faces the world.
When love and femininity are intertwined, only some of us are expected to do the job of loving.
“I think of McCarthy and ‘The Group,’ giving me language to understand myself before I even knew that’s what I needed.”
Maybe telling ourselves we’re balanced, that we’re in control, is almost as good as the real thing.
Sometimes I still think about my suits and the life I could have had. Now I work for myself, and my standard uniform is jeans and a T-shirt.
“As a young woman, I was rarely in control of my body or my mind. I had hungers like snakes wildly contorting from my head.”
Platforms like Facebook already act as mediums between the living and deceased.
“There is a saying in book collecting: You only regret the books you don’t buy.”
Fitzgerald was ground down, I imagine, consumed by how to take care of her family. This didn’t make her any less the thinker, writer, reader, that she was.
“We have become so good at seeing our environment—our planet and the people upon it—as a rolling scroll of film.”
I was embarrassed each time I got out my camera.
Susan B. Anthony once said, "I think it has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world."
“Was I meant to get that desk just to show a stranger the course of her life?”
I told Kingston how much her book meant to me as a half-Chinese woman, as a writer. It showed me my own life was worthy of examination, even exaltation.
