Life & Love

My apartment building in Washington Heights, Nuevayol, has not had gas during this entire pandemic, and it looks like this will last for another long stretch of months. This means: no oven and no stove. The hotplate given to us by management is crappy by dormroom standards—the HI-MED-LOW markings scratched off within a day so…

Last June, as my Mother walked out of Lincoln Hospital, where she’s the head OB-GYN nurse, four white trucks lined the Bronx facility’s facade. She asked a coworker standing at the street corner, “Are those them? Are those the trailers?” The woman turned and nodded. “Yeah, those are like the mortuaries now.” They were refrigerated

The first pronghorns appear in the meadow in June—three adults and two twig-legged newborn fawns, all of them the same tawny gold as the wild grasses they lounge in and graze, with crisp white patches on their cheeks, throats, chests, and bellies. They’re watching me with their binocular vision, ready to run at the slightest

Back in 2019, I traveled a lot for work. I lived out of my carry-on and slept in hotel rooms almost 200 nights out of the year. In a typical week, I never cooked, rarely had more than two nights in a row in my own bed, and ordered a lot of takeout. Now, not

Courtesy Mary-Louise Parker She would have read this first. So many times, when I finished writing something, I either sent it to her or dumped it in the trash. Technically, she kept me from throwing away much of my life after trying to make sense of it on paper. She won’t be reading this one.

For the past year, we’ve been living in what has been endlessly dubbed our “new normal.” In our “new normal,” we stay inside. We don’t see people we don’t live with, and when we do, it’s with masks on and at least six feet apart. In our “new normal,” we cancel our gym subscriptions, our

Kristen Radtke This story is part of ELLE’s Lost and Found: One Year in Quarantine. Click here to read all the stories in this package. Kristen Radtke Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (2017), and the forthcoming books Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (July 2021),

I’m sitting upstairs, trying to work, but loud guffaws keep emanating from downstairs. “I’m sorry,” I say to the person on the other end of the call. “It’s my son.” My Mother is giggling, and my 18-month-old son is emitting the loudest belly laughs you’ve ever heard. “A hat!” she says, in a singsong that

Almost one year ago to the day, my colleagues and I left our office for the last time—not knowing it would be the last time, for a long time. The intervening year has left plenty of us feeling the enormous weight of loss—of loved ones or dear friends, of time and experiences out in the

On February 3, nearly four months after she lost her third child, Jack, to pregnancy complications at 20 weeks, Chrissy Teigen shared that she was experiencing what felt like baby kicks in her uterus. “My little Jack would have been born this week so I’m a bit off,” Teigen tweeted. “I truly feel kicks in

It was a Monday. I dropped ice cream on my kitchen floor and struggled for hours to clean up. By Tuesday, it felt like things were constantly slipping out of my hands. By Wednesday, typing had become difficult. I found myself making more and more unexplained errors in my emails and messages to friends and

Kinsee Morlan was working 12-hour days, which really meant she spent 12 hours each day searching for 20-minute pockets when she could get her actual job done between running her household and overseeing distance learning for her two young sons. Every morning, she gets the kids fed and dressed, helps them log onto their virtual

Where do things with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West stand after weeks of reporting about the pair imminently pursuing a divorce? According to E!, they aren’t talking, and Kardashian is now extremely “stressed” about the situation, Entertainment Tonight‘s source added. E!, Entertainment Tonight and People all ran new reports yesterday about the state of the

When you think of Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness and lifestyle brand, vagina-related products probably come to mind. Maybe you think of the controversial jade egg or the 24-karat gold sex toy, or perhaps the instantly-viral “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle that sold out within hours. Now, this Valentine’s Day, you can get ready to

Years ago, I worked at an upscale restaurant with a huge communal table in the middle of the dining room. It sat 26 and was reserved for large groups. Apparently, there are people with 25 friends. When there weren’t large groups, the table sat empty. During lunch and dinner rushes, we offered seats there to

When I was 19, I paid my way to San Francisco with pornography. I answered an ad for the cheapest room I could find, and when the girl who lived there asked me, I lied and said I was straight. I didn’t know anyone. Men or boys asked me to go places, and I went.

In the eight years since our first date, I’ve always bought my husband flowers and chocolate for Valentine’s Day. (Matt displays the flowers and I eat the chocolate.) But if the seditious attack on the nation’s Capitol taught me anything, it’s that I need to up my game in the Valentine gift-giving department. This year,

“Did you say things like you love Elizabeth Clark?” “Yes. She was my wife. Of course I would have said that at the time.” “Okay. And did she say she loved you back?” “Yeah, I’m sure.” “And did you love her at the time?” “No.” “You’re saying you didn’t love your wife.” “No.” “You just

Love hurts, but falling off the bed in a corset and thigh-highs hurts more. That’s what I’m learning at Bedography, a virtual “women’s empowerment class through dance,” according to Julia Sokol, CEO and founder of SassClass, the dance studio that produces the series. The Instagram tutorial combines the moves of a rookie stripper with the

Sleep has never been an especially easy task for me. Like many people, the unsoothing nature of the past year have made my attempts at a good night’s sleep acutely hellish. Lately, I do what I expect most of us do: jerk awake offensively early after spending hours clawing my way to sleep, spend a

On September 14, 2020, I thought I was eight weeks, two days pregnant. I was supposed to be. I should have been. Since my positive pregnancy test, the first thing I did every morning was open my pregnancy apps to watch the number go up and find out how the size of the embryo growing

In bed one night, my husband told me, “I talked to Dave today. He and Chloe are getting divorced.” The last time we saw Dave and Chloe, they were the picture of a happy couple. We’d shared a pizza and beer, talked about the vacation they’d just taken and how they wanted to have kids

On Sunday night, Christie Smythe transformed from journalist to subject, when ELLE’s story about Smythe’s romance with “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli went live. Shkreli, a pharmaceutical executive who became infamous when he raised the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent, had subsequently been arrested on federal fraud charges—and Smythe broke the story of

Almost every weekday for six years, Christie Smythe took the F train from Park Slope downtown to her desk at Brooklyn’s federal court, in a pressroom hidden on the far side of a snack bar. Smythe, who covered white-collar crime for Bloomberg News, wore mostly black and gray, and usually skipped makeup. She and her