Essays, dispatches and long-form commentary on culture, power and modern womanhood — new work every Tuesday.
The week's essay · 3,420 words · 14 min read
On Quiet Rooms, and What We Owe the Women Who Leave Them.
A friend closed the door of her study one Sunday and did not open it again until the Friday. She did not write a book. She did not leave a marriage. What she did was less dramatic, and harder to name: she sat, for six days, with a question she had been carrying since she was twenty-three, and she let it finish her. I have been thinking about the shape of that week ever since — about the rooms women step out of, and the rarer rooms they decide, at last, to step into.
This week's essay is an attempt to write my way toward what she showed me. It is also, quietly, a dispatch about the cost of being addressed — what it takes to hear yourself when everyone you love is, with the best will in the world, speaking over you.
Read the latest essayFrom the archive
Recent essays on culture, power and modern womanhood.
-
On the Particular Loneliness of the Woman Who Refuses to Mediate.
A long essay on the price women pay when they refuse, in meetings and in marriages, to translate their meaning into language their audience can bear.
-
What the Album Did That the Essay Could Not.
Notes from a fortnight of listening to the year's most discussed record on repeat, and what it taught me about the limits of long-form prose.
-
A Letter to the Woman Who Apologised at the Lectern.
On the small, gendered surrender of the word sorry, and a practice I have been trying, for one month, in its place.
-
Three Days in Lagos, in the Company of Women Writers.
A field notebook from the Lagos reading week — on literary friendship, translation, and the geography of the sentence.
Read in nine languages
Selected essays are translated by volunteer reading groups in Berlin, São Paulo, Tokyo, Seoul, Mexico City and beyond. Translations appear the Friday after each Tuesday essay.
- Español
- Português
- Français
- Deutsch
- 日本語
- 한국어
- Italiano
- Türkçe
- Èdè Yorùbá
Tame Notes
The podcast companion to the essays.
A monthly conversation recorded in the studio in Soho, with the writers, editors and critics whose work has shaped the week's essay. Eighteen episodes to date; new ones land on the first Friday of each month.
All episodes of Tame Notes-
On Writing the Long Sentence — with Namwali Serpell.
A conversation about the ethics of the long sentence, the politics of the footnote, and what it means to read at the pace of one's own attention.
Listen to this episode -
In the Margins of the Essay — with Merve Emre.
On the editorial cut, the reader who disagrees, and the strange privacy of being misread by someone you love.
Listen to this episode -
A Quiet Riot — with Rachel Kushner.
On writing about women who break things, the long arc of an artistic life, and what it costs to refuse the second act.
Listen to this episode