“I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head. Love is an illusion, but I would willingly fall for it if I could believe in it.”
—Sylvia Plath
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
—Joan Didion
“I feel cluttered when there is no time to analyze experience. That is the silt — unexplored experience that literally chokes the mind.”
—May Sarton
Please enjoy these links to some published writing by me!
• A Little Dirty Laundry: The Forgotten Legacy of Grace Metalious and PEYTON PLACE
• The Sordid History of Truman Capote’s BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
• It’s My Mess: How I’ve Scrapbooked My Way Through Mental Illness
• Ursula Nordstrom and the Queer Revolution of the 20th Century Children’s Book
• How NANCY DREW Helped Me Reject Toxic Masculinity and Gender Roles
(and more)
• Why ‘Rhoda’ is Still Worth Revisiting Five Decades Later
• How Sydney Bristow’s Badassery Made ‘Alias’ One of My Ultimate Comfort Shows
• 20 Years Later: How ‘Felicity’ Captured the Highs and Lows of College
• Why ‘The Family Stone’ is My Favorite Queer Holiday Film
(and more)
• 6 Tips for Surviving Anxiety as an Introvert
• Fefe Dobson is Ready to Rock Again
• Mandy Moore Returns at Last With ‘Silver Landings’
• How Strong, Angry Women in Pop Culture Guided Me Through the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Alessia Cara’s ‘In the Meantime’ is a Spellbinding and Necessary Body of Work
• Ralph Talks ‘Gradience’ Her Strongest and Queerest Work Yet
(and more)
• Holy Hell! The Spirit Room Turns 20
• Revisit: Amy Grant: Heart in Motion
• Criminally Underrated: G.I. Jane
(and more)
“Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”
—Nora Ephron
“We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans — because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.”
—Maya Angelou
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even yourself at some later date. Otherwise you will begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
—Margaret Atwood
JEFFREY READS 