OUR BRAS. IN TRANSLATION. Is it just us, or do they look bigger in French?
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I LIVE ON A GRID. I call it The Grid. It’s a character in our lives to some extent, and everyone who knows it makes fun of it, and I’m good with that. Printed on a large white board, written in erasable dry marker, The Grid sits on my desk, in full view as I write, mapping out the seven days of my week and how I live them. On it is written even the incidentals—“walk the dog,” “stretch,”—as well as the truly important chunks of my life, like “write,” “meet the bus,” and “gym.” [click to continue…]
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WHERE I COME FROM, the word “salad” means lettuce. Perhaps that lettuce will be accompanied by onions, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, crumbled cheese, or all of the above, but lettuce—and I believe I speak for all my homepeople when I say this—would be the foundation of all things “salad.” And, being a New Yorker, I went along thinking my way was the highway until fate stepped in and threw a man in my path some 21 years ago who, when he said “salad,” was speaking a different tongue. So we got married, and mixed things up. [click to continue…]
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WHEN I READ SISTER ANASTASIA’S “Tips for Single Ladies (c. 1938)” today, all could hear in my head was the lyric to some long-ago song: “You must walk feminine/Talk feminine/Smile and beguile feminine/Utilize your femininity/That’s what every girl should know/if she wants to catch a beau.” Turns out it’s a 1963 Hayley Mills relic. When I sang it for the TSP women, they all got real silent. Can’t understand it. Hasn’t every woman watched every single Hayley Mills movie and memorized every song? I know I have.
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YOU KNOW HOW WE LOVE US SOME SINGALONGS. I mean, we’ve done it before. So here, for all you sisters juggling holiday prep, is our seasonal song, to be sung to the tune of There is Nothing Like a Dame, which, if you need to be reminded, is right up top in the music video. [click to continue…]
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EVERY TIME THE HOLIDAYS COME AROUND I am reminded that one of these days I simply have to do something with my mother’s ashes. It’s been nearly twenty years since she died. This length of stay out of the grave, or water or air, is not that startling. My father’s ashes have been in a closet at my sister’s house for more than 30 years, and though I tell myself that the right ritual will present itself, even the turn of the century came and went without inspiring an interment. [click to continue…]
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THINK IN PROPINQUITIES. It’s a phrase that makes me sound more prim librarian than not, I know, but I love that word “propinquity,” and its reminder that you think of your angle shots when the topic you want to write up is Thanksgiving, for instance. Don’t give us a Polaroid of the day, but rather some side view that illustrates how you learned a new way to give thanks. It happened to me when I brought a New York City cab driver to Thanksgiving dinner. [click to continue…]
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DANIELLE TOLD ME TO do it, and so I did. And I am so grateful, taking up one commenter’s suggestion and reading another novel by Margot Livesey (left), this time Eva Moves the Furniture.
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OCTOBER SEVENTH IS THE BIRTHDAY of one of my favorite writers, Diane Ackerman, whose observations of nature have delighted millions of readers for many years. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Orion Book Award, John Burroughs Nature Award, and the Lavan Poetry Prize, as well as being honored as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, she even has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her, called dianeackerone. Ackerman’s essays about nature and human nature have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, Parade, The New Yorker, National Geographic. I love A Natural History of the Senses, although who can resist her An Alchemy of Mind, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden; The Rarest of the Rare and The Moon by Whale Light? My kind of woman, she once put a bat on top of her head to see if it would really get tangled in her hair. It didn’t. How do I know this? I write and record the daily almanac piece entitled The Naturalist’s Datebook, heard exclusively on Martha Stewart Living Radio, Sirius 112/XM 157. Listen up.
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SCHOOL IS BACK. After a long summer of not teaching, I am back where I love to be, three weeks into a new class on memoir. And it’s a great class: Twenty-one eager writers, all with their own tales, all willing to do the work to get the pieces on the page. And each week I ask the same question: [click to continue…]
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First time here? Here's the idea: 
No surprise, really, that sisterhood, often life’s longest relationship and always one of its most important, has been the Muse for so much creative self-expression by women, and also by men. 
As the suffix of its name suggests, 
