Life & Love

Early in my new novel, We Were Never Here, there’s a scene that was hard for me to write—it skates too close to a truth that fills me with anxiety and shame. In it, Emily, a twenty-something woman on vacation in Cambodia, brings a hot South African backpacker back to her hotel room… I discovered
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Central PressGetty Images The past 16 months have taken so much from all of us: time, loved ones, income, joy, too many restaurants to count. I managed to make it through the worst stretch of the pandemic relatively unscathed, which is to say I only caught a light case of COVID-19, transferred all my friendships
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Over the last year, our worlds became small. Instead of planning an exotic escape to Iceland or plotting stops on a cross-country road trip, our travels were limited to walks around the neighborhood—or just from our couch to the kitchen. But as our lives open back up, all we want to do is cash in
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In July 2019, I tasted dal, the South Asian equivalent to chicken soup, for the first time in four years. The red flat oval lentils, eerily similar to the microscopic imagery of the red blood cells that my anemic body lacked, floated in a spiced broth that thickened after cooking for hours in a metal
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For many of us, the last year was as clarifying as it was challenging, with isolation and grief sharpening our focus on what truly matters. The things we thought made up a life were forcibly supplanted by the things that actually do: it became, quite suddenly, deathly important to find joy anywhere—in blossoms that appeared
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Before the pandemic, Kristen Wilson, 33, was a reluctant gym-goer whose discomfort in fitness environments caused years of unpleasant experiences. In group classes, she’d push herself to the point of pain, overextending because she didn’t want to look out of place among the workout zealots beside her. “Even yoga, which is supposed to be relaxing,
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Carly Leahy went into 2020 with a plan: She’d get married to Charlie, her fiancé of nearly two years, and then down the line the two would try to have children. Instead, the 31-year-old co-founder of the reproductive health company Modern Fertility was met with a global pandemic, an unexpected pregnancy, a cancer diagnosis for
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What if you could speed past the endless “How r u”s, bathroom mirror selfies, and interminable texting to get right to the good stuff: A relationship with a decent person who can form complete sentences and seems genuinely interested in more than your tatas. I know what you’re thinking, Is there an app for that?
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By winter, “the Millinocket wedding” had basically become shorthand for a “coronavirus superspreader event.” Stories about COVID-19 that ran in local papers were sometimes accompanied by a photo of the Big Moose Inn Cabins & Campground for no other reason than that everyone associated the one with the other. Keirnan Monaghan and Theo Vamvounakis The
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