“I didn’t want to look as the boy wormed himself to the curb and sat hunched, catching his breath. Scrambled hair, dazed eyes, skinned cheek. Fuck, he moaned, and spat into the street.”

“I want my students to fall madly in love with Rosalind. She’s my favorite of all Shakespeare’s heroines, I tell them, pressing my hand to my heart, pretending to swoon.”

“What I know is that that I have endless days, months, years ahead to rub myself up against the moment, to grab the moment by the back of the neck and pull its forehead to mine, to press our mouths hard together.”

“It is one thing for Odysseus to leave Penelope and Telemachus back in Ithaca as he sails for decades upon the wine-dark sea. But mothers have never been able to assert their alone needs quite so easily in life or literature—at least not without negative, and often devastating, consequences.”

“A baby insists on the here and now, while frozen embryos lie in wait, straddling what has been, and what might be. They keep their distance until they’re summoned.”

“It wasn’t exactly creativity I was channeling into my daughter. Rather, it was a sort of frantic, white-knuckled enactment of the mother I believed I must be, an enactment that required nearly all my energy and will.”

“My children’s sparks are everywhere—on the floor, the stairs, the rug. They accumulate in corners and under tables. They trail their bodies like crumbs.”

“I fall back on the greatest power I know as an adolescent girl, which is to say nothing.”

“Meaning, I learned, had an architecture. A sentence, depending how it was built, could crack the heart open like a cathedral door, or leave it numb as a concrete cell.”

“Outside the window, it’s the kind of day where the sky is twelve shades of blue and branches sway and you can hardly believe there are deadly particles flying through the sky like bullets. When the air clears, when the particles have spun away, how will we proceed into the world?”

“In this city, I’ve never slammed doors or snapped at my children for putting their shoes on too slowly. My legs are unmapped by veins, my forehead unwrinkled by worry. In this city, the scent of rose-musk trails my footsteps, and my being is a lovely mystery.”

“Our children remain, clock tick to clock tick, under our watchful eyes, as close as shadows. And in their captivity, we, too, find ourselves captive, surrounded and bound by their sweet and relentless need.”

“In 1982, I begged my mom for a pair of jeans. I was six then, and my baggy corduroy overalls would simply no longer do. I wanted jeans—real jeans—the kind of jeans the big girls wore who hung around outside the minimart: close-fitting, low-riding, ass-hugging, dark blue jeans.”

“My mind can feel like a room ransacked, littered with toys and thermoses. But I no longer chalk up these mistakes to some internal malfunction. So many, I now see, stem from something far beyond my neural pathways: the impossible demands of modern motherhood.”

“What distinguishes Montei’s book from other excellent critiques of contemporary motherhood published in the wake of the pandemic…is its emphasis on corporeal autonomy — a focus all the more urgent in our post-Roe landscape.”

“I spoke with Novak about the myth of the solitary artist, the connection between art-making and caregiving, and the power of using just the right word at the right time.”

“Monsters takes on serious subject matter, but Dederer’s companionable and often humorous voice made me feel, while reading it, as if I were sitting in a coffee shop chatting about art and bad behavior with a good friend.”

“Filtering her experiences as a mother and daughter, wife and sister, friend and artist through the lens of fairy tales, Mark illuminates the lasting power of folklore to illuminate truths about the human condition.”

“I imagined my own life without its longings and hungers, wishes and ambitions—and what I felt wasn’t happiness but agoraphobic terror. Weren’t these the very things that gave my life shape and meaning? Just who, exactly, are we without our wants?”

“Keisner grants herself—and her readers—access to the deeper, more sustaining forces that underlie our anxieties: attachment, devotion, joy, and an exquisite awareness of the preciousness of life. What we most fear, her writing reminds us, reveals what we most treasure.”

“As much as I’d like to like to think of myself as a feminist who happens to be white, I now see that — when I bought my daughter a “Girl Power” t-shirt without considering the labor conditions that produced it, or when I published a feminist think piece using the pronoun ‘we,’ as if speaking for all women — I’ve also been, at times, a white feminist.”

“We find ourselves, mid-pandemic, in a state of profound metamorphosis, all of us hunkering down in our cocoons, groping toward an unclear future, understanding, collectively, that our world will never be the same when we emerge.”

“In the end, it seems to me the most revelatory writing—the writing Zoffness gorgeously achieves with this collection—isn’t a ‘window’ or ‘mirror,’ but a combination of the two, a shifting kaleidoscope that transforms what we see and know.”

In perhaps his sole moment of fashion criticism, Henry David Thoreau opined that his fellow Americans had no right buying new clothes until they had worn out their old ones through hard work and honest living.