The Heart is the Haunted Place
The most potent ghosts in Doug Dorst’s debut novel Alive in Necropolis are the spectres of regret that haunt protagonist Mike Mercer. Mercer is that kind of pushing-thirtysomething whom we’ve all...
View ArticleA Driving Lesson
Throughout my teen years, my father and I merely co-existed. Our mail came to the same address, and we occasionally shared family dinners of spongy meat and overcooked broccoli. My mother would titter...
View ArticleThe Moments Between
Violence was always the way we remembered each other. My father was the sting from a belt-buckle, a sting that feels thick and sharp at the same time. He went with me through my day. In school, I used...
View ArticleWhat About Peggy Olson?
Like most women whose hopes and passions reside in this business of the written word, my friend and fellow Nervous Breakdown contributor Arielle Bernstein and I have been following Franzen-gate with...
View ArticleTomorrow is a Long Time: Zombie Politics in Post-Obama America
As the election results came in last November, I found myself empathizing with the hero of The Walking Dead; small town sheriff Rick Grimes had newly awakened into a world where large swathes of the...
View ArticleThe Mediocrity Exhibition
It’s a trite but truism that there are certain films, certain albums, and certain books that serve as barometers for where we are in life: By our late-twenties, the Holden Caulfield who articulated...
View ArticleConfessions of a Prude: Why I Can’t Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the SlutWalk
In certain circles of educated women who’ve mastered the all-mighty art of snark, pondering aloud which one of the four Sex and the City ladies each one of you is most like is considered especially...
View ArticleWe Only Said Goodbye With Words: A Tribute To Amy Winehouse
Somehow, I’m still expecting that, in another six months, year tops, I’ll be able to preorder the next Amy Winehouse album. Somehow, I’m still expecting word that she’s joined the 27 Club to be just a...
View ArticleWhite Knights and Black Flags: A Look at Masculinity in Drive
Drive is a vicious thrill of a film. The visceral kick of that hour and a half in the theater becomes aftershocks of insight during the drive home, the next morning’s coffee, and even a walk with the...
View ArticleThings We Leave Behind
She was every greeting card illustrator’s vision of the angelic blonde child: milk-pale skin and eyes as blue as polished slate, perfect ringlets of a blonde so blonde it was nearly white. She was the...
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What The Hunger Games Gave Me
“The main character is totally vicious, but she has her reasons. Actually, she kind of reminds me of you.” The friend who insisted that I read The Hunger Games knew me all too well. Still, I wasn’t...
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The Best and Worst Parts of You
The best advice you’ll get about turning thirty will come from that friend of a friend who drinks until he gets far too loud and a little too touchy (in both senses of the word). But when he sidles...
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Review of Love, In Theory, by EJ Levy
EJ Levy’s new story collection, Love, In Theory, is a powerful array of contradictions: sensuous yet wry, bruising yet brainy, perfectly precise yet voluptuously messy. Her characters inhabit...
View ArticleThe Great Unfathomable How
As the news comes in, the only sound I want to hear is my goddaughter’s voice. But her mother, who I’ve known since we were both college freshmen bonding over a love of Easy Rider, James Dean and...
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Promises and Threats
Certain films, whether they’re franchise fare like The Hunger Games or The Avengers, or indie tone poems like Tree of Life or Drive, insist on a visceral, almost inchoate, appreciation. Sure, you can...
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Anything Less Than Extraordinary: Breaking Bad and American Ambition
Breaking Bad’s five-year run coincides with the emergence of a populist brio that sings the sanctity of American ambition: Everyone who works hard enough deserves to be his own boss, deserves to break...
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