Books
As a writer, I’m drawn to themes of gender and family, class and ethnicity, ritual and belief, anxiety and death. In short, many things. In my first book (Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo, Harmony/Random House), my co-editor and I asked twenty other literary writers to join us in reflecting on a single, transforming episode that defines each of them as an only child. My second book (Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild / Palgrave Macmillan) explored the fights and frenzies around feminism in America across generations. I remain obsessed with how we, as a culture, are steeped in assumptions that variably foment and impede both personal and social change.
Sisterhood Interrupted
Older and younger feminists are often depicted at odds, with elder feminists cast as relics of a bygone era and younger feminists portrayed as unaware and ungrateful of the work their mothers did. In fact, as Deborah Siegel points out in this book, younger women are not abandoning the movement, but reinventing it. [read more…]
Only Child
Only children don’t have to share bedrooms, toys, or the backseat of a car. They don’t have to share allowances, inheritances, or their parents’ attention. But when they get into trouble, they can’t just blame their imaginary friends. In Only Child, twenty-one acclaimed writers tell the truth about life without siblings – the bliss of solitude, the ache of loneliness, and everything in between. [read more…]