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Sunbeams

There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage, just like the rhythm of a courtship — only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpse. The death has occurred much earlier.

Erica Jong

The Fox

It was hard to believe the fox was dead. It’s been frozen for a month and hasn’t decomposed at all. It seems a shame just to bury it. I want the pelt, but where can I find out how to skin it?

The Notary Public

Ghost Triangle

That winter, after Betse and I discovered we were infertile, I became fascinated by pearls. My passion for them resembled an addiction, though I hesitate to call it that. There was a ritual aspect to it, a heady anticipation, an urgency I didn’t always understand.

Like A Leaf In Autumn

A Reconsideration Of The Good Death Of Scott Nearing

Although from the very beginning I noticed occasional inconsistencies in Helen’s account of Scott’s death, I assumed they were simply the internal equivalent of the way different witnesses remember different versions of an accident. Only, in Helen’s case, the versions differed over time, rather than from witness to witness.

Sunbeams

There is something that happens between men and women in the dark that seems to make everything else unimportant.

Tennessee Williams

Marriage

Monogamy

Wife-swapping, ten fucks, a master’s thesis in comparative literature

Feminism Then And Now

A Conversation With Alix Kates Shulman

The definition is much broader now that feminist ideas have spread throughout the culture. I would say that anybody who wants to call herself a feminist is a feminist. In addition, there are “applied feminists” — to borrow the writer Carolyn Heilbrun’s wonderful term — meaning someone who may not call herself a feminist but who lives like one. In the early days, there was a lot of debate about who was a real feminist. At the beginning of any movement, definitions seem to matter more. In the late sixties, there was a sense that we were just a handful of people. As the movement spread, we were very worried about being co-opted. So whether or not a newcomer was a “true” feminist seemed to matter, especially if that person was representing feminism in the media; there was a lot of mistrust of the media. We didn’t want to give up on our larger ideals and settle for something less.

Marriage Is Impossible

To begin with, marriage is an impossible topic of conversation. Just try to put into words what makes a friend’s marriage work — never mind your own. It’s impossible to fully describe, much less arrive at a consensus about. Marriage is a subject sure to disrupt most dinner parties. Ultimately a product of the human imagination, it appears in countless forms and varieties. For reformers and many feminists, marriage is oppression and legalized rape, while right-wing fundamentalists (Christian, Muslim, and otherwise) see heterosexual marriage as an act of salvation for civilization.