I’m still riding high from last week’s awesome, inspiring conference about the writings of Ellen Willis, co-organized by her daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz. Nona has put together an anthology of Ellen’s rock criticism, which comes out this month and is a must-read for music lovers and cultural critics (I still can’t get over the brilliance of her Janis Joplin essay, reprinted here by Salon.com). I wrote a short review of Out of the Vinyl Deeps for the May issue of Elle, which just happens to be the music issue.

This one’s for the (other) men in my life! I wrote a fun feature for the March 2011 issue of Women’s Health magazine about the joys of having guys as friends.

For a more in-depth exploration of this topic, check out Juliet Lapidos’ fantastic series on platonic friendships for Slate. Inspired by her own close, platonic friendship with a childhood pal named Jeff, Lapidos set out to find out what qualities define opposite-sex friendships, and to find role models. She notes that despite the prevalence of guy-girl friends in contemporary life, they seem to be lacking from the media, as well as from academic research. Psychologists and scholars are obsessed with romantic pairs, but a platonic friendship between a man and a woman seems to leave them cold. (My own research also proved this to be true. One sociologist, agreeing that there was a dearth of studies about opposite-sex friendships, joked that maybe researchers “get older, get married, and lose interest in studying their guy friends!”). Lapidos does a great job of looking at opposite-sex friendships from different angles.

(UPDATE! The link to Clock Watcher is up.)

In 2008, I wrote a piece for ELLE magazine about the financial costs of having a child. I admitted that the USDA’s 17-year estimate of $204,060 (it’s even higher now!) seemed so daunting that it was forcing my husband and I to put off parenthood — possibly indefinitely. We just didn’t see how we’d ever make enough money to raise a child without sacrificing our career ambitions, our hard-won happiness and our relationship harmony. I became obsessed with this quote from economist Elizabeth Warren, “Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse.”

The response to my article was mostly sympathetic, and many young couples admitted to sharing my terror over child-raising costs. However, I also heard from women–and it was always women–who dismissed my financial panic as unnecessary. When I was ready to have a baby, they assured me, maternal desire would trump most practical concerns. The cost of diapers and day care would become irrelevant as I focused on bringing life into the world. My money worries certainly wouldn’t disappear, but they would become more of a consideration than an obstacle to motherhood. And if they didn’t? Well, if I could let something as mundane as money prevent me from having a baby, that must mean that I didn’t want to become a mother badly enough.

Most of this feedback was honest and well-meaning, and it got me thinking: many of my girlfriends had openly worried about the effect that a baby would have on their careers, their finances, their relationships and their sense of self, but that hadn’t stopped them from (eventually) taking the plunge into parenthood. Some had given in to a chronic desire to have kids, but others described an impossible-to-ignore urge to have a baby, despite the sacrifices.

My article opened up a new set of questions for me. Everyone now knows how expensive it is to have children, and we’re all more aware of how difficult it is to have kids in the United States, which is now globally infamous for its lack of parental support. However, those facts haven’t had a significant impact on America’s women: they’re having children later, but the nation’s fertility rates have barely budged (especially compared to Japan, Korea and most of Europe).

I started to wonder what it would take to get me over my financial fears — aside from a new career and a new husband, that is (those are non-negotiable). I thought about the way some women talked about their urge to get pregnant as if it were their destiny, as if Cupid had misfired and sent his arrow into their womb instead of their heart. Would this happen to me, if only I waited long enough? If I were receptive enough? Was there a biological explanation behind sudden-onset baby lust? I’d heard so much about the biological clock, but not much about the alarm mechanism that is supposed to let us know that this thing is working. I’m older and most likely less fertile than I’d been when I wrote my cost-of-kids piece, but I’m still undecided about babies, and still fixated on the financial aspect of parenthood.

I decided to explore this further, and I wrote about my findings in a follow-up article for ELLE called “Clock Watcher.” It’s in the February 2011 issue, out now.

Valerie Trueblood’s New Book Nails the Messiness of Ordinary Lives

In her outstanding new collection of short stories, Marry or Burn, Valerie Trueblood uses the threads of familiar topics—love, marriage, separation, general angst—to spin affecting, utterly unexpected yarns. There are first dates, broken hearts, unlooked-for affairs, and of course weddings (brides and grooms figure prominently in five of the 12 stories)—but Trueblood has completely rewritten the script for each of these everyday events.

People who cheat on their spouses or lose their first loves or their firstborn share these truths with their children—not in dramatic confessionals, but in the manner of parents passing along family history. A married woman finds herself fantasizing about her friend’s husband—a charismatic, generous man who’s dying from lymphoma. A disastrous affair between a teenager and her now-institutionalized history teacher’s related to us from the perspective of the girl’s aunt. A divorced doctor, while recovering from the recent death of his tempestuous lover, accidentally catches his ex-wife’s boyfriend with another woman.

As in life, even minor characters in these stories carry their own crucial emotional baggage. Trueblood, a master of pacing who is in her sixties, understands the intrinsic muddle of relationships and the essential imperfection of love—but she also respects our cultural hope for romantic happiness. While ties are brutally severed and lovers die early, her characters continue to marry and move on, like this alcoholic widow trying desperately to keep things together at her daughter’s wedding: “Her eyes, in which her daughter has put soothing drops, blaze the blue of her dress, her feet clench in the new shoes, she vows, as at her own wedding, eternal beginning.”

(reprinted from ELLE.com, November 2010)

(This is not me. It’s Ali Larter in the movie Obsessed.)

When it comes to checking up on an ex online, it’s just so darn easy to let our fingers do the stalking. I’d read a lot about how Facebook-stalking can become a dangerous and demoralizing activity, but I had a hunch that it might also help some of us get over past relationships. Well, according to the experts I talked to, it can go either way. My story’s here, at ELLE.com.

ps: Now I need to see The Social Network!

A Mother in the Trenches

My interview with Sharon Lerner, the author of The War on Moms: On Life in a Family-Unfriendly Nation, is on ELLE.com.

A Tale of Two Sisters

Allegra Goodman nails the last brief American age
of wonder

Her keen observations on the manners and mores of insular communities have earned Allegra Goodman (Intuition, Kaaterskill Falls) comparisons to two of her favorites, George Eliot and Jane Austen. Her new novel, The Cookbook Collector (Dial), set in the boom-and-bust years from 1999 to 2002, may remind readers more of Charles Dickens (another on her list) and his fin de siècle masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities. In Goodman’s variation, Emily is the 28-year-old CEO of Veritech, a Silicon Valley start-up, and her little sister, Jess, as charmingly unkempt as Emily is stylishly buttoned up, is a philosophy grad student at Berkeley. Their mother died when they were young, and both are now searching for connection to something bigger than themselves. Emily, like so many, becomes a paper millionaire after her company’s IPO. She maintains a long-distance relationship with a technology entrepreneur in Boston. Jess, an environmental activist, works at an antiquarian bookstore run by George, who made a mint off Microsoft and fantasizes about romancing Jess in his Maybeck mansion.

The cookbooks of the title refer to a trove of rare culinary guides that George and Jess are trying to obtain, which becomes a metaphor for longing, substitution, and thwarted satisfaction. Goodman is especially admired for evoking smart and subtly nuanced characters, and Emily and Jess are so emotionally authentic that I almost tried to Google them. She also perfectly captures what it felt like to be an optimistic, idealistic twentysomething during one of the most optimistic, idealistic periods in American history—when anyone who didn’t risk everything felt like they were missing out on the main chance. Goodman writes that “ultimately Veritech’s true product had nothing to do with data storage. What Veritech offered the public was its stupendous expectations.” Unlike many of the companies of the First Digital Age, The Cookbook Collector is enormously satisfying and well worth the investment.

(reprinted from ELLE magazine, July 2010)

I spend my days veering erratically between starving and stuffed. Apparently, I’m not alone: like “calm” and “satisfied,” “comfortable fullness” seems to be one of those zen-like sensations of equilibrium that Americans have a difficult time mastering. When I was assigned to write about fullness for the June issue ELLE, I was looking forward to achieving a more satisfied state. However, writing always makes me hungry, and because this piece would entail thinking about food and consumption constantly for two weeks, I worried that researching diets would actually cause me to gain weight. And it did! But only a pound, and that could have been due to the stress of working on this awesome, info-packed issue. That aside, I definitely think that exploring satiety helped change my perspective on why and how we eat (and I can vouch for this lasagna recipe. It’s surprisingly tasty and, yes, filling).

Hey, it’s May! Time to get out and root around in the garden — or if you’re a fellow urbanite, time to pick up some organic flowers from the farmer’s market. For me, the birds and blooms of spring are a subtle reminder to get back in touch with the earth, and to stop slacking off on my environmental duties. That’s why I was psyched to interview the Guide Girls , a pair of offbeat environmentalists who are using humor to show us how easy it is to make the world a better, greener place. I write about them and their hilarious “instructisode” videos in the April/May issue of BUST magazine.

May is also the month of ELLE’s annual “Green Issue.” This year, the green focus is on hot-button “gold” issues like energy efficiency, climate change and solar power. For ELLE’s Gold Awards, I was assigned to find young movers and shakers who are doing amazing things in these fields. It was a humbling experience to talk to women like Nikki Henderson, the new Executive Director of Oakland’s People’s Grocery, Aviva Presser Aiden, an inventor who is finding innovative ways to bring electricity to off-the-grid areas, and Erin Noble, the co-founder of Renew Missouri who practically overhauled that state’s archaic energy policy. Talk about making a difference! Makes me realize that composting my kitchen scraps is the least I can do.

Marina Abramovic’s New MoMA Retrospective

The performance artist has made a career out of enduring the kind of physical and mental torment that would make any person’s toes curl.

ELLE, March 2010