Literature

What do you say, when your 30-something daughter asks to move back into your small apartment? What do you say, as a person who isn’t comfortable uttering the word “gay,” when she brings along her long-term partner—another woman? What do you say, when confronted with new ways of living, protesting, loving, and taking up space?

Don’t Trust a Guy Who Promises You the Moon Shadow on the Moon On my birthday, Otto takes me to the moon. I’ve never been before. In my twenty-five years I’ve seen it glowing above me, the Man’s face on the moon pockmarked with the cities we built long ago. There are pictures, of course,

The first chapter of Daniella Mestyanek Young’s memoir Uncultured opens with a screech: It is 1993 and Mestyanek Young—then 5 years old—is inside a commune in Brazil, standing at the back of a line of children waiting to be paddled. As she explains, it’s a normal day in the Children of God, the cult founded

When people ask me about growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, they usually want neat answers to questions like: how long did the Northern Irish conflict last? How many people died? Why did conflict break out? Who won? I can regurgitate some facts as quickly as Wikipedia: the conflict that became known as the

The invented Western history of Thanksgiving, the one often perpetuated as early as elementary school and idealized in broader American culture, is a harmful myth. Here at Electric Lit, we want to use this day to draw attention to the many stories and experiences of Indigenous people and remember the true history and legacy of

Joshua Whitehead can’t be held by genre. Following on the success of his Lambda Literary Award winning novel Jonny Appleseed and poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer, Making Love with the Land is Whitehead’s first full-length work of creative nonfiction. But to describe this book as merely an essay collection is limiting for the depth of emotion

Best Friends Are Better Kept Long Distance Kristen Iskandrian Share article Quantum Voicemail by Kristen Iskandrian The visit was proposed during a period in which I was suffering from the tyranny of time. Which isn’t to say I was suffering because I was getting older—I didn’t care about that. I was consistently underestimating how long

In our series Can Writing Be Taught?, we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re featuring author and creative writing instructor Mila Jaroniec, who is teaching Catapult’s upcoming 12-month novel generator. We talked to Jaroniec about the importance of reading for writing,

In Allie Rowbottom’s novel, Anna is preparing to have an innovative, high-risk surgery known as Aesthetica™ that will reverse all her previous plastic surgery procedures, supposedly returning her to a truer version of herself. At 35, Anna’s influencer career is long-ended, and she now works behind the counter of a department store selling beauty products

Taylor Swift is having a moment—just ask anyone who endured the presale Ticketmaster queues to try to get tickets to the Eras tour. That’s right: Taylor is heading on tour next year to celebrate all her different eras, from her debut album in 2006 to the newly released Midnights of 2022. If you think her

My Menstrual Cup Will Outlast Us All Blood Cup Shape of a shape, foldable up and able, in, to open out, stay put, collect, beyond my notice, riches I have no further use of. Latex or plastic echo of cervix, funnel without an exit; held up, a wine glass without a stem but with the

You Can’t Tetris Your Way Out of Trauma Tetris I was never good at Tetris. I watch you move the L block, turn it so it fits with I. You don’t know I know you’re trying to arrange memories into an order that makes them disappear. After the desert, after the new scrap metal, after

It’s impossible to create a cohesive linear narrative out of chronic illness. There often isn’t an identifiable starting point, and there is even less often an identifiable stopping point. There are, instead, waves that rise and fall with each episode, each flare, each day spent trying to keep one’s head above water while pain tries

In August 2011, 19-year-old Mac Miller headlined Boston Urban Music Festival, a free show at City Hall Plaza outside Boston’s Government Center. It was the summer going into my sophomore year of high school. From a distance, I imagined how the festival would go down: my classmates smuggling booze in flattened Poland Springs water bottles,

I found my history classes in school to be mind-numbingly dull: just memorization of dates and battles, kings and presidents. Conspicuously missing from the pages of my textbooks were women. To make up for this, I turned to novels, where I found heroines who too often were tormented, passive, wringing their hands over a man.

A Bottle Girl More Flush Than Your Hedge Fund AJ Bermudez Share article Bottle Girl by AJ Bermudez Amy is twenty-one today. (Everyone is twenty-one today.) The club—seafoam green, on the insistence of a long-since-vanquished investor—thrums with the buzz of a thousand bees. Bass as buzz. Flirtation as buzz. Crane-necked/half-verified celebrity as buzz. Neon sign

How do you discuss something so intimate and uncomfortable as finding a spouse, without laughing or crying or cringing in embarrassment or fear? How do you talk about it without using the L-word? As in Luck. As in, you can plan and strategize as much as you want to, you can prepare as if you’re

The memoir Heretic opens with Jeanna Kadlec boarding a bus to the Middlesex County Courthouse in Massachusetts, where she is filing for divorce against her husband, an Evangelical Christian, and pastor’s son to boot. Kadlec is twenty-five and exhausted from the labor of suppressing her queerness. But, as a lifelong believer, she knows the consequences