School’s out, and it’s a good thing, too — because across the world, young women are being kidnapped, raped, and shot to death while pursuing an education.

If that sounds shocking — terrific. I’m glad to know we haven’t yet become desensitized to the violence that female students are enduring. But we haven’t become sufficiently enraged about it, either. And that’s equally shocking. Remember when girls and women could go to school and expect to graduate unharmed? Here’s what’s happening now:

• There are 164 Nigerian girls missing after being abducted from their school in April by Islamic terrorists who oppose Western education and have threatened to sell the girls into sexual slavery.
• In the U.S., one in five women is being sexually assaulted during college, and more than 50 universities are being investigated by the Office for Civil Rights for mishandling sexual-assault cases on campus.
• And here in our progressive, civilized town, six people were murdered when an angry young guy embarked on a rampage to “punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex.” The killer, whose name will never appear in a column of mine, left written rants about waging a “war on women.”

Continue reading Are You a Feminist NOW?

Every book club is good at something. Whipping up themed dinners, for example. Or planning out meeting schedules a year in advance. Or spotting motifs and allegories throughout a novel.

My book club is advanced at arguing.

In our decade of existence, we’ve quarreled over the time, day, format, and frequency of meetings. We’ve squabbled about hardcover versus paperback and Kindle versus iPad. We’ve gone toe-to-toe over who would play the main character in the movie version and whether it was fair to choose a book in which a child dies. Yes, that happened.

We once had a particularly squawky and even tearful meeting that is still affectionately referred to as Book Club Fight Club.

We’re an opinionated bunch, and I love that about us. Who wants a book group that’s too timid to tell you what they really felt about a bildungsroman — or worse, who felt nothing at all?

What we argue about most is endings. The 12 of us can work ourselves into a good, literary lather over a tome’s final pages: an off-kilter epilogue, a dissatisfying denouement, an outrageous resolution that leaves us locking horns over whether the author is a genuine Joyce-ian genius, or in fact lacks the depth god gave a bookmark.

Continue reading Where Does the Story End?

I had “help” writing this column. At the recent launch party for my newest book of columns, Broad Assumptions, I held a contest inviting guests to submit the first and last lines of a column they’d like me to write — promising that I’d supply the middle part for the winning entry. Twenty-three people wrote suggestions, ranging from “My all-time most embarrassing moment is …” to “Thank God for duct tape!”

The crowd voted on the winner: an exacting couplet by vexingly imaginative reader Hattie Husbands. She won a set of my three books, and I walked away with the lines you see in bold below.

Last Saturday I was sitting in my kitchen sipping my coffee, when suddenly my cat turned and said to me …

“What the furball were you thinking?” my fictitious feline purred. “Writing a column that starts and ends with someone else’s words?! You know very well that you don’t have a cat — don’t even like cats — and certainly wouldn’t be talking to anyone before you’d finished your morning coffee. Meow the hell are you gonna write yourself out of this mess?”

Continue reading A Reader Writes My Lead

“How do I look?” It’s a funny question coming from a woman with severe bed head, a drooping lip, prune juice stains on her hospital gown, and all manner of tubes and wires emerging from various parts of her person.

So I figured you were joking. Good one, Grandma. Leave it to you to make fun of yourself just days after a stroke left you slumped and alone on the carpet of your living room. Now, propped up in your mechanical bed in the neurological wing, it figures you’d be the first to fearlessly acknowledge the rumpled old-lady elephant in the room and snicker at her unkempt state. I smiled and waited for your next line; what would it be? Something funny. A facetious quip to show us that your spunk sure as heck ain’t paralyzed. “Am I about ready for the Governor’s Ball?” you’d probably say. Or “pretty as a picture, right?” Or maybe “a face that only a mother could love.”

But the quip never came. I stopped smiling. You weren’t joking. And as I sat holding your impossibly soft hand with your impeccably shaped nails, I think I realized what you really meant.

“How do I look?”

Continue reading How My Grandma Looks

I’m about to take you on a journey to the dense, chewy nucleus of the grape Tootsie Pop that is my head. You have been warned.

You see, my brain is very busy. It’s a frickin’ railway junction. I pride myself on my ability to juggle, organize, and accomplish, even in a crunch — no, especially in a crunch. “Show me a quiet mind,” I always say, “and I’ll show you a to-do list that’s been criminally neglected.” This morning I did Kegel exercises while writing my column lead while being power-flossed in the dentist’s chair while feeling rather smug about it all.

But I had no right, it turns out, because multitasking is out and meditation is in. The Huffington Post declared 2014 The Year of Mindful Living, and Time magazine’s recent cover story declared, “If distraction is the pre-eminent condition of our age, then mindfulness is the most logical response.” Rupert Murdoch is meditating now. So are 50 Cent and Kourtney “it’s possible I can’t spell meditate” Kardashian. Meditation is the new kale; it’s the balm for all that ails us.

Continue reading What the Focus This?