At 25, I bought a one-way ticket to Johannesburg in the months after Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town was published. My hazy goal was to re-create his overland journey across Africa, except I’d do it from Cape Town to Cairo. My desire was to crisscross Southern and East Africa … Read more
Over the course of my ceaselessly peripatetic life, as a writer who’s lived all over the place, the word “home” has always carried a complicated meaning. My tiny family of origin is fractured, far-flung, and nontraditional. By the time I was 15, we’d moved to four different houses in the Bay Area and three different … Read more
Every year, the same gif appears on my social-media feeds like clockwork: Rachel McAdams as pissed-off, suburbs-resenting, concert-tee-wearing misfit Amy Stone in my favorite dysfunctional-family Christmas movie of all time, The Family Stone. Granted, calling her a “misfit” in a family where everyone is slightly weird is a little unfair, but Amy is messy-haired, grouchy, … Read more
Besides an ill-fated immersive play I starred in at my liberal arts college, I don’t have much experience on stage. At queer bars, I’ve always considered myself more of a rhythm-challenged spectator; someone who politely tucks a five dollar bill into a dancer’s jockstrap, then retreats into my own world of exchanging low-stakes gossip between … Read more
