What Are Women Made Of? As I child, I remember reciting, What Are Little Girls Made of? Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice. Somehow, that never seemed right. The girls and women I knew were made of stronger stuff. Wanting to better define this, I began interviewing women as a graduate student and never stopped. I’ve interviewed over a hundred women over the past decades, almost all of them over forty, in search of a
A Politically Correct Scapegoat? Anthropologists have long debated the idea that targeting certain members of a society as “others” who don’t deserve care and respect has survival value for the group as a whole. If we assume that people have inborn tendencies toward violence, then focusing blame on a subgroup might support the cohesion of the larger group. We can find plenty of examples to support that idea, especially in authoritarian societies where stigmatizing a
My Debut Novel – and I’m 72 And never once has a publishing professional asked about my age There are a few, vanishingly rare, incidents in life when the stars line up in such a way that you begin to doubt the evidence of your own senses. As in, I’ll wake up soon, because this can’t really be happening. I call these iceberg moments, when a sparkling spire juts above the water line, dazzling in
Adjusting to the Now, Over and Over Again Last week I attended a conference in Santa Fe, Quest 2026, all about vivid aging for older women. One of the speakers was Kat Miller, a counselor and pro-aging activist who talked about falling in love with impermanence (“Crazy, right?” she said). Kat urged each of us to buy a bouquet of flowers and keep it until the petals turn to dust, to photograph each stage and
The Gray New Deal My first published novel, The Gray New Deal, is appearing as I turn 63. In the novel, seven seniors who shared a college co-op in Austin fifty years ago reunite to create another co-op. Together, this intentional community navigates Trump 1.0 and the first years of the pandemic. They’re a diverse group racially, in economic assets, and in sexual identity. They collaborate on household chores, concocting “econo-meals.” They make friends with
Artificial? Yes. Intelligence? Maybe. Years ago my son bought the house Marion Zimmer Bradley owned at the end of her life. She lived there in community with the writers who ghost wrote many of her later novels. Those books, published under Zimmer’s name to take advantage of her established readership, really did literally take advantage of her readers. The quality was uneven and so was the voice. Standing in my son’s living room, I vowed
