Essays

On Motherhood, Rumaan Alam, and Sheila Heti

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I have never been able to shake having lunch with a Pulitzer Prize-winning author in Berkeley before leaving the Bay Area and asking her what she thought about having a child. “It is,” she said, “A ball and chain. You will be shackled for life.”
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Essays

Who Will Buy Your Book?

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I am here to tell you: most people in your family will never buy your book. Most of your friends won’t either.  
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Essays

The Burden and Necessity of Genre

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Something doesn’t feel right about defining my novel, about giving it a genre (a word that has always conjured for me cover images of bursting corsets and rippled abdominals). Something doesn’t feel right about defining novels at all.
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Essays

Table Talk in Austenworld

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In Austenworld, meals are much more about the rank and file than about the elites. Here, conversation goes to the quick, to the bold, and to those who care the most—not to those with credentials or book deals.
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Essays

Working from Home (with a Kid)

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If my son hasn’t napped by 2 p.m., I’m right on the edge of sanity. Disappointment about not being able to do my own work while he’s up is at its peak. I can’t write, I can’t grade, I can’t do anything.
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Essays

Writing Back to Guy and Harriet Pringle

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It wasn’t all geography, colonialism, and the erasure of the traces of the "receded Ottoman Empire,” as Manning puts it in the book, that I learned from Fortunes of War. It also taught me a lot about a certain kind of relationship, a certain kind of man.
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Essays

Why I’ve Stopped Waiting for ‘The Winds of Winter’

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This is not a transactional relationship. There is no quid pro quo here. My giving George R R. Martin money, my helping him achieve superstar status, does not earn me the right to dictate and demand when and how his next book should appear.
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Essays

Should We Still Read Norman Mailer?

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Sharp-eyed yet unreliable, inquisitive but quilted in self-regard, Mailer covered the 1960s with an insightful fatuousness that irritates and rewards as much now as it probably did then.
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Essays

My Winter with Edith Wharton

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I did more work under Edith’s influence than I had done in the six months preceding it. I admit it—I was slightly scared of her.
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Essays

The Cockroach Decade

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It took just $60 to hire somebody to kill somebody. A loft rented for $350 a month. A double feature of foreign films at the Carnegie Hill Cinema cost $1.50. The World Trade Center loomed in the distance “like twin phosphorescent robots.”
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Essays

Returning to Analog: Typewriters, Notebooks, and the Art of Letter Writing

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We’re used to working alongside multiple distractions in multiple tabs and windows: a conversation with a friend in messenger, an interesting tangent on Wikipedia, that funny cat video your mum knew you’d like.
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Essays

On Being a Trend

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This is the reason millennials are arguably the most annoying of generations, besides the economic collapse. They are caught in the middle. Too obsessed with social media to be relaxed in the “real” world; too unnatural to it to feel at ease within it.
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Essays

Write What You (Don’t) Know: Graduate School, Research, and Writing a Novel

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For someone who had an abiding interest in the world, writing from what I knew was not an option. I needed a bit of faith; I needed to take a flying leap into the unknown world just beyond my vision.
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Essays

The Literature of Mars: A Brief History

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We are entering a new age of Martian exploration in both science and science fiction. As humanity strives to reach out toward the Red Planet, more imaginations will be sparked, more pens put to work.
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Essays

Read It Again

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As my grandson sits beside me, I feel the echo of my son or daughter when we’d read together, and the even more distant echo of my father, who taught me, with a single book, the power of a human voice channeling the delights of a story.
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Essays

‘Frankenstein’ and the Science of Transitioning

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Trans people enter the narrative as problems to be solved. The constant judgement placed upon them, the way their most basic needs become a matter of public debate, encourages them to re-closet themselves, to pass for cis and hide their backgrounds out of fear.
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Essays

Us Animals: Writing the Natural World Back into the Human

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There had been yet another shift in myself and how I chose to write. It was as if the softening of my connective tissue and joints that accompanies new motherhood also found its way into my words.
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Essays

What’s in an Author Name?

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Friends and family call me Marie, and Koreans revert to Myung-Ok—but no one uses both. Marie Myung-Ok Lee then becomes the embodiment of my writing.
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