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Memoirs of an American Girl I remember that winter as through a veil of dark water. It felt like I was sinking in a jar—full of grime and muffled voices—a winter that wasn’t a winter at all, but rather an evaporation of the soul. It was 2005, and we were landing at Otopeni.   I still see that green glow of the afternoon hovering above the runway, and at its far end, half-dissolved in fog, a billboard with   salami shining in an eerie light. My mother was crying. She had crie

Why Henry Miller’s “Sexus” Falls Short of Greatness Painting by Modigliani, “Nude Sitting on a Divan” I wanted to like Mr. Miller. I wanted to like him the way one wants to like a neighbor. After all, he was one of mine—a compatriot of fire escapes, smoking asphalt, and roaring trains at night. And truly, there is no better writer to describe New York. His prose echoes that old city hum, its vulgarity and splendor, distilling a unique, gritty kind of glamour into one red-hot

52 Lessons in Love, Pain, Style, Confidence, Womanhood & more A portrait from my 30th anniversary, Bucharest, Romania On Womanhood 1. To find meaning in the intensely feminine nature of life –in cooking a soufflé or ironing a collar– is not incompatible with finding meaning in Susan Sontag and writing an essay. 2. A laundry basket will not threaten your emancipation as long as you are confident in your skin, or fluent in Aristotle. 3. There are three ways to be equal or super

Thoughts from New York The thing is you do not move to New York simply to meet new people, or try new things, or stumble upon a handsome...

Literature Meets Telenovela If Dostoyevsky had taken a big hit of ecstasy and — by God knows what means — teleported himself on a modern...

Your Favourite Position Isn't CEO Once, in a gray season, I wrote in a journal that identity begins when one is liberated of the desire...

On Old Money-New York She looked like cash—a load of fresh cash on a waterbed in a Vegas hotel. I don’t know why she gave me the impression of a Vegas hotel. Perhaps it was her metallic voice or golden legs and pearly hair, conjured by some magician in the laboratory of Frédéric Fekkai. But there was something rotten about her as she walked through the doors, amid a trail of sand and a gust of mold and the clatter of Egyptian bracelets. I don’t know what it was – perhaps a lo