More to Hate

Warning: Spoilers ahead. Content warning: strangulation, sexual violence There are two moments of physical woman-on-woman violence in Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke’s runaway hit debut novel. In the first, the main character of Natalie—a good Christian girl struggling to fit in at Harvard—confronts her roommate Reena. Reena has ostensibly lied about an awkward sexual encounter which Natalie witnessed, which Natalie reads as consensual and Reena claims to her friends was coercive.

My six-year-old daughter went back to school this week. After school drop off, my husband and I both went back to bed and slept until nearly 10am. In many ways, it was a gorgeous summer: we swam, we picked three kinds of berries, we went to the farmer’s market, we had time with friends and family. But the lovely memories too easily conceal the expense and effort and hence the privilege that went into achieving this.

When Gloria Steinem died last week, at the age of ninety-two, I was not ready. She meant a lot to me, and to many other feminists. Steinem coined the term “reproductive freedom,” and was at the forefront of the pro-choice movement for decades. In 1980, she published The Nazi Connection, a brilliant exposé of the manipulative emerging metaphor of aborted fetuses as a kind of Holocaust in the making.

My beloved father always writes with a Montblanc fountain pen, in the privacy of his study. It is a beautiful room stuffed with antique furniture and books and a real Persian rug. Growing up, he would tease me gently about how I did my own work: curled up under a blanket on the couch with my laptop and the cats, reading Wittgenstein or Frege to inform the essay I was writing. I would also keep a palate-cleansing YA novel like a Saddle Club book on hand for later.

It’s back to school week in my world, which means a 20% off sale on all new subscriptions for the next 24 hours only. Thank you for reading and supporting my writing. As always, I comp anyone who needs it, no questions asked—just message me. Thank you so much for your support and your readership! Here’s to much more to love in the coming school year. More to Hate is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Friends, it’s back to school week in my world, which means a 20% off sale on all new subscriptions for the next day only. Thank you for reading and supporting my writing. As always, I comp anyone who needs it, no questions asked—just message me. Content warning: sexually explicit content I write from a place of gratitude. To have been recognized and understood by so many people has meant a great deal to me.

Friends, it’s back to school week in my world, which means a 20% off sale on all new subscriptions for the next week only. Thank you for reading and supporting my writing. As always, I comp anyone who needs it, no questions asked—just message me. Content warning: sexually explicit content Yesterday I published an essay about a negative experience prior to a recent TV interview in Switzerland—having a markedly inappropriate interaction with my in-ear translator.

Content warning: sexually explicit content It’s always tempting to minimize your own story before someone else does. Better to shrug nonchalantly about the impact of some experience than to risk the humiliation of having people question whether you have the right to your reaction. Better yet to stay silent. I am writing this essay anyway because I want to be candid about a recent experience that affected me deeply.

I was never all that interested in flowers before I stared at a dahlia a few years ago. I had enjoyed other flowers, to be sure, and even got slightly enthusiastic about the pale blue mophead hydrangeas that we bulk-ordered and stuck into the obligatory glass Ball jars for our wedding seventeen years ago. But when I looked at that dahlia at the farmers’ market—a marvel of geometry and color gradients—I was struck by both its vividness and its subtlety and complexity.

“I’m scared he’s going to die by suicide,” I told my friend Cadence on Thursday. “I’m scared he’s going to die by suicide,” I told my husband Daniel on Friday morning. Seven hours later, our friends came to our house for dinner and told us the terrible news: Jason Arday was found dead, in a manner so far described by police as “unexpected” but “not suspicious.” This was completely, utterly, tragically predictable.