Chelsea Bieker’s mother left when she was 9 years old. “Growing up, I was hungry for narratives that were tackling some of the things that I was experiencing and feeling,” she recalls. Whenever she found those stories, she says it felt healing, cathartic — a release. “It didn’t feel like I was so isolated — it made my experience feel more universal,” she says. In Bieker’s […]
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There are still many questions about schizophrenia — what it is, what causes it, and how to treat it. One family has helped researchers take steps forward in attempts to find answers to these questions. The Galvins seemed like a model for baby-boomer America, 12 children with a military dad and a strict but religious mother growing up in Colorado in the 1960s. But over the […]
Cameron Esposito speaks at the GLAAD Media Awards on April 1, 2017 in Beverly Hills, Calif. Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for GLAAD Cameron Esposito couldn’t have known her memoir Save Yourself would come out in the midst of a global pandemic. But her aptly titled book includes observations that feel eerily pertinent to this unsettling time. “Humans are scared out of our minds and want to be […]
In her new graphic memoir That Can Be Arranged, cartoonist Huda Fahmy recounts how she met and married her husband. The subtitle is A Muslim Love Story — and Fahmy says it’s exactly that. “Muslims are not a monolith … This is not The Muslim love story, it’s A Muslim love story,” she says. Fahmy’s Muslim American; her mother is Syrian and her father is Egyptian. […]
What does it mean to call a woman ambitious, disciplined, mature, or feisty? A new essay collection explores how these words, which may sound complimentary, are loaded with sexist ideas that diminish the women they describe. Pretty Bitches, edited by Lizzie Skurnick, examines how everyday language creates double standards in the workplace, raises unrealistic expectations about how women should behave and look, and punishes them when […]
Julia Alvarez has written what she calls her first novel as “an elder.” “It took a while to sort of process this stage of life that I’m in,” she says. “And you know, what are the stories that I can tell now, from the hindsight and the insights that I’ve gained that is different. And you have to, you know, learn that.” The author of beloved […]