Essay

What happens when we return to the places we once thought were suspicious of us, to the places we kept secrets from? 

When I learned that the jewelry my family had given me over the years was a morbid kind of safety net, I came to dread my future every time I put on a piece of gold. 

Mass intimacy requires a dilution of one’s complexities. In order to become a celebrity, a person necessarily becomes a personage.

For two years after one of my closest friends killed herself, I thought my grief and guilt were meant only to be handled privately. Tree of Smoke reeled me back into the world.

My father's stories come from a career behind the bar of New York's oldest pub, among the alcoholics and loners and deviants who became his people and helped him find his voice as a writer.

For the past five centuries being black has meant collectively experiencing grief in ways that the rest of society does not understand and cannot fully comprehend.

On the bloom of spectacular decline.

Where I grew up, feminine boys were cautionary tales. I couldn’t explore my identity and remain a model queer boy, a boy who fits in.

In her original incarnation, the only female Smurf reminds me of all the assumptions I've had to navigate about my sexuality and sense of self as a Jewish woman.