Status Updates From Bad Feminist: Essays

"Human endurance fascinates me, probably too much because more often than not, I think of life in terms of enduring instead of living."

(The illusion of safety)

"I cannot write the way i want to write and consider using trigger warnings. I would second-guess myself, temper the intensity of what I have to say. I don't want to do that. I don't intend to ever do that."

"Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning. This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone."

"I swallowed the truth, which only made that gaping void of need inside me yawn wider. Just because you survive something does not mean you are strong."

(What we hunger for)

"As a critic, I recognize the significant flaws, I do, but The Hunger Games is not a movie I am able to watch as a critic. The story means too much to me."

(What we hunger for)

"All too often, representations of a woman’s strength overlook the cost of that strength, where it rises from, and how it is called upon when needed most."

"The way we currently represent rape, in books, in newspapers, on television, on the silver screen, often allows us to ignore the material realities of rape, the impact of rape, the meaning of rape."

"I once wrote an essay about how, as a writer who is also a woman, I increasingly feel that writing is a political act whether I intend it to be or not because we live in a culture where McKinley’s article is permissible and publishable. I am troubled by how we have allowed such intellectual distance between violence and the representation of violence. We talk about rape, but we don’t carefully talk about rape."

"We have also, perhaps, become immune to the horror of rape because we see it so often and discuss it so often, many times without acknowledging or considering the gravity of rape and its effects."

"Happiness is not uninspiring if we don't allow our imaginations to fail us."

"Sometimes, and especially as a writer, I feel like I have no idea what happiness is, what it looks like, what it feels like, how to show it on the page."

"The happy endings in Game of Secrets are subtle and incomplete but they are there, and it works because happiness itself is often subtle and incomplete."

"Happiness is not a popular subject in literary fiction. We struggle, as writers, to make happiness, contentment, and satisfaction interesting."