American Dirt: A Bridge to Nowhere

“I first heard about American Dirt from Myriam Gurba’s scathing critique of the novel on Tropics of Meta. Her take immediately made sense, and it jolted me. Back in graduate school, I — a white, American woman — had written a novel about Mexico. I had lived there with my husband, Jorge, who is from Oaxaca, for five years. Many of our friends are Mexican; my extended family is Mexican. I speak fluent Spanish. I normally write nonfiction, and this was the only piece of fiction I had ever felt pulled to write. It was about a pregnant 17-year-old Oaxacan woman who adopts a dog. Yes. Really. I very briefly flirted with the idea of trying to publish it and was told that no one would want to read a novel that featured a Mexican protagonist — could I find a way to make the main character American?”

Read more on Longreads.

I love Elizabeth Gilbert, and you can too, The Outline

“Profiles of bestselling and iconic author Elizabeth Gilbert tend to begin with a declaration of what she is currently doing or feeling, presented with a touch of irony. Elizabeth Gilbert is owning her past mistakes. Elizabeth Gilbert isn’t afraid to show her scars. Elizabeth Gilbert wants to see how alive we can be. Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t care if you think her new book is chick lit. Each hints at a suite of hopes and fears with which women writers often contend. Gilbert represents the fantasy of many women writers — the juggernaut bestseller, the speaking gigs and financial success and adoring fans– and also the nightmare: the contempt of critics, the "chick lit" label, the inability to crawl out from under a single book that has been deemed unabashedly female and therefore unworthy of serious critique.”

Read more on The Outline.

On Quitting in the Middle of a Marathon, Gay Magazine

”A marathon is a ridiculous event. Kids dressed as tacos hand out marshmallow gel packets — the precise color and consistency of sperm — to thousands of bib-wearing, Lycra-clad humans hobble-running way farther than their middle-class working-professional bodies want to allow. People vomit and cry and stumble. People shout “YOU’VE GOT THIS BUDDY!” at other people vomiting and crying and stumbling. Spectators clang cowbells and hoist the pixelated faces of their loved ones on sticks. A marathon is a painful enactment of the absurdity of contemporary life, our alienation from physical labor, our hunger for meaning and purpose and community. It is also an excuse to lie flat on one’s back wrapped in a blankie like an infant, weeping in public.

I’ve run four of these. I’ve quit one.”

Read more at Gay Magazine.

Behind the Writing: On Research, Longreads

“In December, I turned in the first draft of my second book. I assumed that when I finished it, I would stand up and scream. Actually scream “YES!” followed by a stream of sundry obscenities, then collapse on the floor and make my husband take a picture for Instagram.

Instead, I was in a quiet back room of Hillman Library, on the University of Pittsburgh campus, drinking a 99¢ mug of coffee, googling Erich Fromm quotes, when I suddenly realized I was done, and I just sat there mildly stupefied, then caught the bus and went home.”

Read more on Longreads.

What it took to finally confront my family about race and politics – The Guardian

My four-year-old daughter has recently started to notice skin color. “Mommy,” she points out when we take a shower, “your skin is white, and my skin is brown, and Papi’s skin is brown!” With a four-year-old’s mania for classification, she lines up our arms in order of deepening darkness. She counts: “Two browns, and one white!”

Read more on The Guardian.

Telling our daughter why hate came to our town – The Washington Post

Around 10 a.m. on Oct. 27, I left my house in Squirrel Hill to go for a run. As I waited to cross Murray Avenue, a police car raced up the center of the street. I found it strange, but I kept on, passing dozens of Jewish families heading to synagogue. I ran in the street to give them room. I saw one mother beckon to a little boy lingering on the threshold of their home, and I smiled at him. Then I entered the park and disappeared into the reverie of my music and my run until, 20 minutes later, my husband, Jorge, called.

“There’s an active shooter in the neighborhood,” he said. “Don’t come home. We’re not allowed to go outside.”

Read more at The Washington Post.

Who's Afraid Of The Personal Essay? – Buzzfeed

"I read the New Yorker short story “Cat Person” as I read most things these days: in the bathtub with a beer, after my daughter had gone to bed. I enjoyed it. It was eerie and resonant and it brought up unsettling memories. Then I went online and realized that there was a significant literary conversation on Twitter lamenting how Kristen Roupenian’s story — about a brief online relationship that turns bizarre, creepy, and upsetting in person and ends badly — was being read as an “essay” or a “piece” or an “article.” Some people just seemed bothered that fiction wasn’t getting its due credit during its viral moment. But many seemed indignant that the essay — a form troublesome for its femininity and popularity — was tainting the purity of literary fiction."

Read more on Buzzfeed. 

Unfiltered: How motherhood disrupted my relationship with social media – Southwest

"My Facebook post about the birth of my daughter—written while still flush with adrenaline from 12 hours of natural labor, taking sips from a 36-ounce Buckeye Baby cup of ice water—was the most gushing, earnest thing I’ve ever shared on social media. It lacked any sheen of irony, any of the sly meta quality of millennial self-representation. I included seven photos, some featuring the baby still slick with gore. (Yes, I was that person.) Then I disappeared into a tiny wooden cabin in rural Ohio."

Read more at Southwest.

Between Mom and Stepmom – Longreads

"Meg first appeared to me as a nimbus of curly red hair, looming above my top bunk late at night. The hair, backlit and aglow, was so remarkable that I reached up and patted it as though it were a rare creature. Meg offered the nervous, extra-buoyant 'hi' of the girlfriend meeting the boyfriend’s kid for the first time. In reply, I stroked the hair."

Read the full essay on Longreads. 

On Oaxaca, Early Pregnancy, and Motherlands – Lit Hub

"On our first night in Mexico, at the 30-dollar-per-night Hotel Canada just off the Zócalo in Mexico City, Jorge dreams he’s being chased by a giant gorilla. “Subtle,” I say. “Scared of something?”

I am 12 weeks pregnant. As predicted by my mother and sister, who experienced the same pregnancy timeline, the fog of the first trimester lifts. It is dramatic as a curve in the road and around the corner, clarity, sun, the smell of meat finally enticing instead of repulsive. It comes at just the right moment, when we land in a city of a million taquerías."

Read more on The Lit Hub.

The Blue Jay's Dance: What Louise Erdrich Taught Me About Motherhood – The Paris Review

"Nine weeks into my pregnancy, in the middle of an Ohio woods lit gold with fall, I sat in a small, dark cabin and wept. I had no idea how to proceed and I also understood with a wrenching clarity that I could not turn back. I had no model for pregnancy beyond the asexual lady on the cover of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, clad in neutral sweater and slacks, plain-faced in her rocking chair, an emblem of the dull, docile femininity demanded of American mothers. I was terrified of her blandness and of my own obsequiousness to that book, my careful noting of the iron content in dried fruit and my newfound pedantry about pasteurization. After a decade spent trying to prove my exceptionality, I found myself, in October of 2013, flailing in my newly discovered ordinariness. I felt my life, my identity, my future like shattered glass at my feet."

Reed the story on The Paris Review Daily.

The Rider's Prayer – Finalist, The Atavist's Digital Storymaker's Awards

Originally, the goal was to ride the bull to death. How long this took, we don’t know. Days, perhaps, of relentless bucking and lassoing, cheering and drinking, waiting and then rising to attention with clenched heart, until finally the knees buckled, the horns tipped, and the enormous jowls sagged into the dust. How many jinetes maimed, killed, in a crude ring of hand-hewn logs?

But no one needs to be reminded that, as French anthropologist Frederic Saumade put it, “the ritual of jaripeo dramatizes the relationship with death.” That’s why everyone is there to begin with: for that horrific, mesmerizing possibility of hoof crushing skull, or for the transcendence of the Indian jinete with arms raised and head thrown back saying fuck-all to his conquerors and the daily toil of his fleeting life.

Read more at The Atavist.

Reunion Island: Chantilly – The Common

We lived in a half-built villa by the sea. It was terrifically gaudy, and the most breathtaking place any of us had ever lived. The two long walls of the rectangular main room rose only to knee height and from there became screen-less windows, which could be closed by winding down shutters. We left them open day and night. To the west we could see the vast cobalt blue of the Indian Ocean all the way to the heat-white horizon, and to the east, Reunion Island rising in boxy pastel-colored buildings and palms to its foggy volcanoes and peaks. 

Read more at The Common.

My Own Mexican Revolution – World Hum

I was walking back from the grocery store, loaded down with bags, when a man came up the sidewalk. I looked down and away. He leaned towards me and whispered, “F**k me.”

The insistent pressure exploded. I lost it. “F**k YOU!” I shouted, and then continued, calling him a dog, a monkey, an animal, a barbarian, and any other disagreeable creature I could think of in Spanish.

Read more on World Hum.