Hello all. First, thank you for picking up Unmentionable, thank you for loving history, and thank you for have voracious curiosity. I have noticed in the month since publication some repeated FAQs. They’re fair ones. I’d like to address them as best I can: Q: Why is your writing style so annoying/snarky/cutesy/hip/corny? A: Well, mostly…
“You haven’t posted in such a long time. I had to call to make sure you were all right. You told me I was to keep you grounded!” Sara went to boarding school with me 20 years ago. She had a tough time of it. Like me, she was chubby, confused by fashion, and in…
. I loved it. I hated it. It felt sick there and so special too. Like Nigger Ben Butte, all wrong, distasteful even, but sickly compelling in its defiance.
I have spent an ass-achingly amount of time combing through image archives, looking for 19th century, hi-res 300 dpi or greater, public domain pictures to put in my book. (UNMENTIONABLE: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners Due Fall 2016 from Little, Brown! Woot!) Which is more difficult than you can even imagine, to find…
Dear Dad My brain has lately become very convinced you’re real. So I am going to indulge it. LE is eight now. You wouldn’t believe how graceful and athletic she tends toward. She’s like…she couldn’t possibly be related to us, you know? I remember, Dad, how when I was a kid and you patted my…
‘ I hate it when I have a great idea but none of my usual editors want it. This happens a lot. “No, we’re not going to publish all that advice you found where Dear Abby tells mid-century women that they LIKED being hit.” or “Our readers aren’t really looking to be confronted…
My male GP offered to do my pelvic exam. Since he and I have established an appreciation of each other’s forthright manner (when I told him I was fat because I eat poorly and rarely exercise he was struck dumb from the shock of having a fat patient own that fact.) I wasn’t suprised when he…
I just spent the last hour, at my 8 year old’s desperate request, translating a true story (taken from one of my earlier pieces) of weird and brutal murder, into a tale worthy of her next Show and Tell. And finding pictures. And let me tell you, it is HARD to find pictures that are ok for…
Sibling Day. So that’s a thing is it? Well, here is what I have to say about that. I still don’t know what I did. I thought everything was fine. Mom died, leaving us full grown orphans. We buried her together, next to our father, each of us shouldering some burden of not being anyone’s…
I have no family of note. My dad was an only child of parents who didn’t keep in touch with their siblings, who also had almost no children. My mother; a more convoluted but similar story. Anyway, they all died and I got generations of papers to store in my garage. I found this…
You're Doing It Wrong 