On Losing Her Religion

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

by Catherine Mallette

MT: That's when everything started to break down, for me. I felt like I could handle the belittlement and subjugation and discrimination myself, but I resisted absolutely the part where I was supposed to begin indoctrinating my children to believe any of it. [continue]

A Novel That Will Make You Gasp

B&N Reads

by Emma Chastain

I loved your book. I loved it so much. I just want to gush about it for the whole interview. It was one of those books that makes me feel like everything else is so fake and phony and this is one of the only things I've read that's about real life and being a woman. It's so real that I wonder if you had to put pressure on yourself as you were writing to be honest and not to worry about what readers would think. [continue]

Sex, Drugs & Fine Dining

KERA's Art & Seek

by Anne Bothwell

On the dark side of being a high-end waiter:  It’s a stage, it’s a performance. You’re expected to provide a very specific experience for people who expect very specific things in their lives related to wealth. The more money you have, the easier it is to see people as tools. And you can create so much distance around yourself with your money that you forget that the people that are doing things for you are also people. [continue]

Freedom to Fuck Up

The Paris Review

by Thessaly La Force

And while it's a hard life on the page, Love Me Back is also filled with the kindness and humor that people offer one another when they know there's no one else. [continue]

 

Fiery Appetites

Guernica

by Dwyer Murphy

Tierce’s world is populated by waitresses, busboys, and bar-backs, outcasts whose artistry is in the relentlessness of their movements and in their ability to endure one more shift while keeping reasonably upbeat and obscene. [continue]

photograph by Kael Alford

photograph by Kael Alford

Abortion Rights Groups Say It's Time to Stop Playing Defense

NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday

by Kathy Lohr

"We've had a lot of increased interest in volunteering with our work," says Merritt Tierce, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, a group that helps low-income women pay for abortions. "The most important thing that has come out of this is [a] conversation about abortion that needs to continue, that needs to intensify and that needs to stay focused on the complexities." [continue]

National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Awards

by Claire Vaye Watkins

MT: I also think gender affects the reception of the subject matter. A man writes a sex scene or a domestic scene and it's an element of a larger narrative—a function, an expression, a grappling-with. A woman writes a sex scene or a domestic scene and poof she's not a serious writer. She's writing homey soft shit that dudes don't want to read about. An irony here is that women buy and read more books than men, so if dudes don't want to read about something the publishers don't have to care. Critics and reviewers, on the other hand, are more often men than women, and are trying to sell their own ideas, not books. [continue]