HBO’s ‘Bright Lights’ Documentary Brings Comfort to Mourning Fan of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
Six months ago, I wrote an open letter to Carrie Fisher, for the Sisterhood, asking Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds to Mother’s Day lunch with me and my mother at Steven Spielberg’s mother’s restaurant on Los Angeles’s Pico Boulevard. The abruptness of their deaths was a shock. “It’s a tragedy,” my own still vibrant, 80-something mother said.
In Defense of Expressing (Career) Jealousy
In a Buzzfeed excerpt of the new anthology Scratch, about the financial side of writing, Emily Gould describes the pressure on women writers (in the NYC publishing world) to be likable. As someone on the periphery of the world Gould describes, I found the essay both fascinating and a bit terrifying. It had never occurred to me that an author would be expected to bake cookies for her readers, although I’m not surprised – I’ve heard the same rumor floating around about how (women) college instructors are meant to bring cupcakes to class on the day student evaluation forms are distributed.
In Essay, Novelist Lucinda Rosenfeld Reconsiders Her Class Origins
I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent New York Times essay by Lucinda Rosenfeld. In “Notes on the Upper Muddle,” Rosenfeld describes imagining she “hailed from the lower end of the middle class,” only to realize later in life that she had grown up “a bona fide member of the bourgeoisie.” She’d failed to take into account the existence of cultural capital – that is, the way her parents’ tastes and education helped her along the way. But she’d also just seen a bit more of society, enough to realize that even if you’re financially poorer than some, you can still be, well, not poor.
Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes Speech May Not Change Minds But Isn’t Fueling Trumpism
OK, so I did not watch the Golden Globes, but I did find my way to Meryl Streep’s political, discussion-provoking, and controversial speech:
Meet the Jewish Woman Who Helped Lay the Groundwork for Planned Parenthood
Four years before women won the right to vote in the United States, Margaret Sanger — the future founder of Planned Parenthood — and her sister, Ethel Byrne, met a young Jewish immigrant named Fania Mindell. On October 16, 1919, the trio opened the country’s first birth control clinic, located in a tenement in Brownsville, New York.