I Am My Longing by Susan Ostrov Weisser
There were my mother’s stories, and there were my books. Books were imaginary but some books could be true; Betty’s stories were neither true nor not-true, they...
Adverse Childhood Experiences
There were my mother’s stories, and there were my books. Books were imaginary but some books could be true; Betty’s stories were neither true nor not-true, they...
Her admission that her diagnosis was terrible news showed a vulnerability in her I had never before witnessed. I had believed that nothing ever weighed on her,...
My mother pressed her cheek to Leslie’s cold face and cried. She rocked back and forth, holding my sister’s limp body close to hers. And those Congolese women r...
This flex-time rehab had been recommended to me by the same doctor who’d prescribed 100 Vicodin every two weeks for fibromyalgia. After a couple of years under ...
My left leg is stuck out as if I was on the verge of going somewhere. My mother will meet him for the first time three months from now.
The practice of medicine is based on the physician’s ability to gather story from the patient. Our story is our human identity and our humanity. It is also the ...
Since childhood sexual abuse is a risk factor for schizophrenia, I’ll always wonder what role Doug played in her plunge into insanity. I didn’t realize that the...
In his place is a little girl with ragged clothes and a dirty face. She has my blue eyes and a cowlick that sits above the peak of her forehead. It has been a l...
Fear is like a tattoo; it can never be washed away.
Join us and overcome your silence. Become comfortable with writing & sharing painful facts and emotional truths. Find your voice as a writer. Master the mem...
The #MeToo Nonfiction Essay Contest is back! What’s more, our judge is that champion of #MeToo memoir writers, Tracy Strauss! Deadline for Submissions is April ...
Gradually Mother’s cooking faded, along with her tan. No longer in the kitchen when I rushed home from school, she’d be lounging on the cushions of our faux vel...
Liliya had been abandoned at six months by her birth mom, left in a baby carriage in a train station in Moscow. The Russian police took her to an orphanage wher...
You want to tell him you wish you could have gone too. That your mother never picked up the pieces. That there was never enough after he left. Not enough love, ...
I have a student who is failing my class. He wants to be writer, but he comes to me and tells me that he can’t write because he is depressed. He is wearing paja...
We avoid their touch by pissing our pants on purpose. Boys don’t want to fondle girls who piss their pants. Fucking babies. We hide. We find a way out of the wo...
Sometimes you lie so much you begin to believe what you say. Sometimes you don’t even have to say the lies out loud to believe them.
I was in the kind of love that puts a rock in your heart and stuffs your eyes with cotton, but you hold that rock and that cotton. Because that’s all you’ve got...
She says she’s got Borderline Personality Disorder. That’s like the worst thing you can have, worse than Bipolar. I feel better being around her because suddenl...
This is the place I remember—with its pine branches, hung like lace canopies. There is the rock slab where they took turns, each first pounding his chest, then ...