It can be difficult to be honest and take an earnest inventory when writing about oneself. As a person with enough food and body issues to fill a book (which I did), I found my body, as a topic, especially tough. I have read a lot of writing on bodies—their needs, their shapes, our wars with and on and for them. At first, I was just a consumer, searching for myself and my truth in their pages, but never finding quite what I was looking for. By the time I finally sold my book pitch for A Physical Education, I hadn’t found an ideal role model for this kind of writing, which meant I’d have to assemble the plane as it was taking off.
In the Protestant Christian tradition that my father grew up in, Adam and Eve learn about sex from an apple.
This is an improbable lesson because nearly all the apples we consume are from trees that reproduce asexually. Apple trees in bloom have both male and female reproductive parts, and their flowers may exhibit several varieties of male-ness and female-ness along a spectrum of different stamens, stigmas, pigments and perfumes. They get help with pollination from other species like bumblebees and honeybees that scurry around their branches in a literal orgy of pollen. Not all apple flowers are sexually productive; some of them, apparently, just like fluffing the bumblebees.
“So, no blonde fries,” says chef David Viana of the platonic ideal of disco fries. “It can’t be mushy. The gravy has to slap. And some people say you can’t have too much cheese, but if it gets too heavy, it actually makes it stick together too much.” As a self-described “Jersey boy,” Viana takes his disco fries seriously.
If you grew up outside of the northeast, you may have no idea what he’s talking about.
“Listen In” does a solid job in showing us how, like most domesticated technology, radio first arrived as novelty, then settled comfortably (perhaps too comfortably) into the background like a piece of furniture, albeit one that entertained you.
Sarah Leavitt’s Something, Not Nothing is a poignant and raw exploration of grief, art, and joy in the aftermath of tremendous loss. In this collection of short comics, Leavitt shares the artwork she created after the death of her partner of twenty-two years, Donimo, who was herself an artist and activist.
If we stop expecting female friendship to be frictionless, women like me will stop wanting to abandon a close relationship every time they feel jealous or hurt. With this book, Watt Smith provides us with a blueprint for how to sustain friendships that are flawed, and sometimes painful – but more meaningful because they are real.