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Articles by Jessica Handler
Summer Reading List 2026
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7 Books that Inspired Jessica Handler’s Novel of Second-Wave Feminism and Rock and Roll
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Handler’s latest novel, The World to See (Regal House, May), follows a young woman’s unexpected friendship with her female rock ’n’ roll hero. My novel explores what happens when friendship becomes performance and the resulting collateral damage blocks the road to reclaiming one’s authentic self. I set the novel in the early 1960s through the late 1970s for several reasons.
The Sound of a Thing Carrying Doom
Kosisochukwu W. Ugwuede — 5 min read I: Arrival Egrets presaged the start of harmattan. Then, when the children laid out large mattresses side by side on the rooftop of their incomplete new house and told folktales about cunning tortoises and proud lizards, they did not know to call the birds egrets.
Galactagogues
Look for the words inside the word. Look for the words you know. This is what I tell my students when they come across a word they haven’t seen before. I want them to peel back the skin, trace a word’s meaning through its penny-scented insides. Just because you haven’t seen it before doesn’t mean it’s not real. I want them to try harder. On ungenerous days, I want to flick their phones out of their hands. I want them to know the wonder of a dictionary, unabridged and heavy. Feel its pages thud open.
Hummingbird Winter
Joanna Brichetto — 4 min read At 6:18 in the morning, the hummingbird feeder looks more brown than red—but still looks like breakfast, and suddenly she’s on it. She is the size of my thumb, she weighs less than a nickel, and all I see is a glowy white throat in daybreak gloom. My winter hummingbird. She should be in Mexico by now, or Central America, but instead is here in my Nashville yard, with frozen seed-heads of goldenrod. She looks around, bends her head, and then drinks for nine long minutes.
Owning My Worth
When I was 8 years old, my father, who turned out to be terrible with money, worked on a colleague’s campaign for U.S. Senate. One day I walked into my parents’ bedroom to find my father sitting on the bed, surrounded by an ocean of cash. “Go ahead,” I remember him laughing, “roll in it.” In my memory, I bounced on the bed as tens, twenties, and denominations I didn’t know existed fluttered around me. My father and I were delighted. We were actually, physically, playing with money.
AJC Bookshelf: Kick-start your writing life with tips from local authors
New York Times bestselling author Emily Giffin, whose latest novel is “The Lies That Bind,” kicks it off with advice about self-perception. “Stop referring to yourself as an ‘aspiring writer.’ You might aspire to see your work published, but you are a writer if you write,” she says. New York Times bestselling author, Emily Giffin.
Messages from Jekyll Island's Driftwood Beach
Illustration by Oli Winward I stumbled onto Jekyll Island’s Driftwood Beach for the first time nearly a decade ago. This was, not coincidentally, the same week that a spider wrote me a note. My husband and I were seeking a pristine, untroubled place to clear our heads before immersing ourselves in deadlines and obligations. I’d been touring with my memoir, a story of family trouble. Mickey was drafting a novel about a dystopian society. Need I say we were deep in darkness?
Shield Athens a grassroots operation started by DIYers
Athens author Deirdre Sugiuchi figured she’d spend her time during self-quarantine sewing cloth face masks. A multi-faceted artist, she sews some of her own clothes, her writing has appeared in nationally recognized publications including Shondaland.com, and she’s finishing a memoir about her teen years at Escuela Caribe, a Fundamentalist Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic.
Author Jessica Handler On Living, Teaching And Learning In Quarantine
On Second Thought is checking in with folks around Georgia to see what they're doing, watching and reading while shut in at home. Jessica Handler is author of two memoirs and the novel The Magnetic Girl, which recently won the 2020 Southern Book Prize. She joined the program to tell us what she is discovering — and rediscovering — while staying home. "On Second Thought" host Virginia Prescott speaks with Jessica Handler.
Nighttime Is a Place — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER
What did we lose? According to the Georgia Conservancy, 27 acres of tree cover each day, among other things. Where did the trees go? Ask the roads that lead to the suburbs, and past them to the exurbs. A suburb doesn’t exist without roads. That’s the point of a suburb: an isolated island of safety and quiet away from the perceived peril and noise of the ever-encroaching city.
THE MAGNETIC GIRL
Of the two narrators who guide listeners through this audiobook, Brittany Pressley does most of the heavy lifting. The story, which takes place after the Civil War, focuses on Lulu Hurst, a Southern girl who discovers that she has the power of magnetism and can will men to do what she wishes. Pressley evokes a beautiful Georgia accent that sounds so authentic that the listener is transported to the marvelous shows Lulu performs. Andrew Eiden's small performance is earnest.
'Magnetic Girl' a crackling good tale about a teenage charlatan
Like today’s youth attempting to understand existence before the Internet, no human alive can truly know what life was like before electricity. Try as we might, we are unable to fully grasp just how fundamentally different the world was without the luxury of commanding such a power.
Nighttime Is a Place
What did we lose? According to the Georgia Conservancy, 27 acres of tree cover each day, among other things. Where did the trees go? Ask the roads that lead to the suburbs, and past them to the exurbs. A suburb doesn’t exist without roads. That’s the point of a suburb: an isolated island of safety and quiet away from the perceived peril and noise of the ever-encroaching city.
6 reasons the New York Times story on Atlanta restaurants gave me cultural indigestion
Last week, the New York Times indulged in its periodic scrutiny of Atlanta’s restaurant scene, declaring that a “city that often looked over its shoulder for culinary validation and inspiration is coming into its own.” On one hand, you could say it was nice that our hometown got such space and (measured) praise in America’s paper of record.
Vanity Fair turned me into a Southern stereotype-and I let them
In some circles, Southern is still an unsettling quirk, an excuse for caricature—like the mute and heroic Boo Radley or wanton Daisy Mae Scragg, heartthrob of Dogpatch. This realization first crossed my path the summer before eighth grade, when a bunkmate at camp in the Adirondacks demonstrated for me the miracle begot by the light switch on our wall. A counselor explained the wonders of our cabin’s flush toilet. My sorry state of being Southern had preceded me.
The Marriage Plate
By Beth Hannon Fuller www.studiofuller.com By Jessica Handler The auctioneer’s receipt for my mother’s tableware reads, 78 pieces Rogers ‘First Love.’ $150.00. I put the receipt in a green plastic file marked “estate.” The hundred and fifty dollars I put in a household checking account. Copious, easily tarnished silverware with extravagant names was a standard wedding gift in the fifties, when marriages were copious. Salad forks, dinner forks, olive and pickle forks.
Lucky Girl - Full Grown People
By honeymoon music/ Flickr By Jessica Handler I was in my late twenties, on a road trip with friends, when I flopped into a chair at a music club in New Orleans and had a look around. We were lucky; the club was rocking, and we were already in a highly pleased state from visiting the drive-through daiquiri place. When I caught sight of a trampled baggie trapped under a table leg, I leaned down to examine it, making as if to tie my shoe.
On the Pain Scale
By hragv/ Flickr by Jessica Handler I have become, at fifty-three, a full-grown person. Two years ago, I stepped into the role of midwife to my mother’s death. I chose it. She was with me when I began. I would be with her when she ended. Lung cancer had colonized her brain, her spine, her right hip and shoulder. Where did this begin? My father smoked, a lot. My mother smoked, very little.
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