Scribe Publications

“Nobody tells you, as a child, that your initiation into womanhood might come at the price of a craving for misuse and violence; that you can protect yourself from others, but that nobody can protect you from yourself.”
― Jessica Friedmann, Things That Helped: Essays

“I am an eater who knows, intellectually, that control is an illusion. I know it experientially and spiritually, through peak experiences and gentle experiences and love and sudden pain and tragedy. But asking the mind to give up control and the mind actually obeying is another animal. I am an eater whose mind says no.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I fear—how could I not?—that I will merely replace one error with another, that I will take avowal of desire in itself as an unalloyed, uncomplicated good in all places and in all situations, that no matter what I try to make of my life, I will never be free of that counterweight, whether I ever speak to another member of my family of origin again—always reacting, equally and oppositely, to someone else's commitments.”
― Daniel M. Lavery, Something That May Shock and Discredit You

“The lipsticks that I own are steeped in sex and blood. In my collection, I have Lady Danger; Relentlessly Red; Good to Go. Cosmo tells me early on that the painted mouth is supposed to evoke the labia, voluptuous and slightly parted, and the names of my lipsticks bear this out: they are unequivocal. There are fast cars, dangers, and passion. There is fire, lust, anger poppies, roses, all of them packed into small, dark tubes.”
― Jessica Friedmann, Things That Helped: Essays