Sublime

This is one of the risks of taking on the role of the defender: if the dream is to lose yourself in a cause, you might wake up one day and realize that you’ve succeeded, and that there’s hardly anything left of you. Women, who are socially conditioned to be selfless, can be particularly susceptible to a version of heroism that sucks them dry.

Once you start looking for it, the only real shocker is how ubiquitous a figure the aspiring amateur is in America and yet how seemingly invisible these people are in our journalistic media.

cricket on a stem, the veined branches

For her entire life, unwittingly, she has complied with her parents’ first shared principle: Make no noise in this world. She, Carmen, Amelia—all three Ma girls. Don’t stand out; you have no right. No one owes you a thing. Keep small, vote mainstream, and nod like it all makes sense. Yet here she is, asking for trouble. Acting like what she does mi

Finding one’s role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script.

The question still unsettles me when I later drive into town to pick up supplies. Who is asking for directions to my farm? The query could be perfectly innocent, asked by someone in search of the previous owner, unaware that the woman passed away three years ago at age eighty-eight. She was, by all accounts, legendary for her sharp wit and her bad

She came up here for college, but her daddy got cancer, and the farm got sold, and ends stopped meeting, and she had to drop out.