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When I was dating online, when every first date was a blind date, nothing confused the feminist in me more than the moment when the bill came. Was the man responsible for the bill by default? If a man considered a woman equally responsible for the bill, did that suggest… Read More

My mother was a riot in the kitchen. She’d look at a recipe (usually in the New York Times Food section) and say, “I can’t make this tonight because I don’t have any parsley.” “Mom,” I remonstrated, “you don’t need parsley. You can use cilantro or just omit it.” But… Read More

The answer is simple:  the truth. Many people have a cynical relationship with online dating and discovering Little White Lies in your introduction is a bad start to a good relationship. Writers are told again and again, “show, don’t tell,” and that applies to public profiles as well as… Read More

In Beloved, Toni Morrison articulated my condition before I started to date again: …way past the Change of Life, desire in them had suddenly become enormous, greedy, more savage than when they were fifteen, and…it embarrassed them and made them sad; secretly they longed to die—to be quit of… Read More

Starting to date at sixty, after two divorces, might prove humiliating or catastrophic. If I failed, which I would certainly do, over and over, I wanted to do it privately, but not necessarily alone. Unless I changed myself, the odds were that I would end up struggling through another… Read More

    Living in France was lovely, at least for ten days. I spoke French, ate and shopped French, and drove French. We ate foie gras, elaborate desserts, fried foods, butter, fragrant cheese; for breakfast we had croissants, and the occasional pastry. And we each lost two pounds. Terry says,… Read More

I love the slyness, insider insinuations, hints, the elegance and sophistication of Barnes’s writing in The Noise of Time. He begins with a surreal scene in a train station going… Read More

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS did not take me far from the mirror. ANIMAL FARM, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, THE ROAD, and 1984 took me into more frightening and uncomfortable worlds, and they happened close to home. Read More

A man I know has his knickers in a twist over pronouns. He is concerned that people will be fined for using the wrong pronoun, and his nephew goes so far as to say that “political correctness,” as exemplified in a discussion about pronouns, is a “cancer on society.” It’s… Read More