There you are, a 25-year-old woman sitting at an outdoor table at the Hungarian Pastry Shop with a spiral-bound notebook, a Mona Simpson novel, and a cappuccino in a heavy white diner mug. Across the street, peacocks wander the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. You sit upright with your pen in hand, notebook open. You’re waiting for inspiration. You’re waiting for your life to start.

“I’m an editor, and I live in Manhattan.” This is a thing you get to say—to old high school classmates, to friends of friends, to a hypothetical attractive man who might strike up a conversation about the bizarreness of free-range peacocks in New York City. If that ever happens, which it never does.

Your life synopsis sounds good, but it implies something that isn’t true. It implies that you have a life in New York—that you are taking lunches with writers and attending literary parties or have any social life at all. But although you have lived in New York for two years, you still don’t feel like a part of New York. You’re still pressing your nose against the glass, trying to figure out how to traverse the invisible, immeasurable gulf to the other side.

Read more in Oldster Magazine.

I’ve just released a new online writing class, Making Your Voice Heard: Write a Personal and Persuasive Essay. You can access the course for free if you sign up for a trial subscription to Skillshare through this link. That will get you two months of access to classes by big-name writers like Meghan Daum, Susan Orlean, Dani Shapiro, Sari Botton, Mary Karr, Emily Gould and Roxanne Gay. (Meghan and Sari’s classes are particularly great.)

In my class, I explain the basics of writing and pitching an opinion piece. I think it could be useful for anyone honing their essay writing skills. It also may be of particular interest to students, activists, and business owners and professionals looking to raise awareness of their services.

Max Daniels felt miserable. After living with two years of nonstop construction noise in her Cambridge, Massachusetts, neighborhood, her nerves were frayed. Finally, she shed the city life for a new home in the quaint and quieter coastal town of Marblehead. As she packed for the move, she pushed herself to ruthlessly purge possessions, following the mantra of Japanese lifestyle guru Marie Kondo, whose best-selling tidying guides urge readers, above all, to shed any belongings that don’t “spark joy.” But once ensconced in her new three-bedroom home, Daniels found herself with an empty attic and a heart full of regret: Why did she get rid of so many beloved books? Why did she toss her late father’s favorite radio?

“I realized there was no space pressure on me,” she now says. “I don’t live in Tokyo.” (more…)

Sometimes, while out with a friend I’ve known for 10 or 20 years, I’ll pivot on my barstool and ask, “Did I ever mention that I’m a born-again Christian?” The question rarely computes. My close friends know I grew up in an agnostic household, and they’re pretty sure the only Sunday morning activities I leave the house for are yoga and brunch. Some have even heard me casually describe myself as an atheist. Nevertheless, on a bookshelf in my parents’ house, there’s a Bible with an inscription in my loopy 10-year-old handwriting: ‘Today, I am a born-again Christian.’ Below that, the words ‘Hallelujah!’ in a woman’s elegant, slanted script.

The ceremony took place at that woman’s house — in my memory, her name is Mrs. Hannah — in the suburb of Cincinnati where my family lived during my grade school years. For my parents, southern Ohio was a six-year tour of duty — just a place where my dad got a job. For my younger brother, it’s barely a memory. But for me, it was where I first encountered the world and where I was repeatedly told I lacked something essential.

“You have a black hole in your soul,” a little boy told me on the way out of kindergarten one day. I walked home and promptly burst into tears in front of my mother.

You can read the entire essay at Longreads.

While reporting his new book, “Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us,” journalist Will Storr attended a week-long workshop at the Esalen Institute, the epicenter of the human-potential movement of the 1960s and ’70s. A shy, curmudgeonly Briton, Storr endures some excruciating group-encounter exercises while trying to maintain a reporter’s remove. He doesn’t belong there, and he’s sure his fellow participants agree. Then a woman from the group challenges him. “ ‘We’ve all been talking about it,’ ” she says. “ ‘Why the hell do you think people don’t like you? . . . You’re sweet. You’re funny. You can’t hide it. Everybody here likes you.’ ”

Storr tries to brush this off, but a swell rises in his throat. In less than a week, he has gone from eye-rolling cynic to member of a tribe. This is one of the many ways “Selfie” illustrates how slippery our identities can be and how quickly we’ll accommodate them to the world around us.

“Selfie” might appear to fit in the genre of high-end pop-psychology books that promise to shed light on the human condition while also telling us how to be more productive, persuasive or in some other way climb a rung or two higher on the winner’s ladder. But this book is no life hack. Rather, in this fascinating psychological and social history, Storr — who has published three other books and is a seasoned foreign correspondent — reveals how biology and culture conspire to keep us striving for perfection, and the devastating toll that can take.

You can read the full review at the Post.

In the fall of 2016, I stood on the concrete steps of a mustard-colored ranch house off the New York State Thruway in Ulster County, a broken red umbrella hooked below my shoulder. The mustached man at the door — 50ish, in a t-shirt and khakis — had the stern, dry look of a high-school science teacher.

“Hi, Thomas?”

He nodded.

“Hi, Thomas, my name is Sara, and I’m a neighborhood volunteer for Zephyr Teachout for Congress.”

Thomas didn’t tell me to go away, didn’t slam the door or scold me for interrupting his day. He stoically endured my spiel about why I was spending my Sunday afternoon doing this — because Zephyr has been fighting corruption for her entire career, and I believe she’ll go to Washington and represent the people of New York’s 19th District, rather than corporations and billionaires.

“Okay, thank you,” he said, closing the door.

“Would you like some literature?” I asked, proffering some rain-dotted pamphlets.

“No, you people have sent us plenty.”

You people.

But, this was the woman I had decided to be on that drizzly afternoon in Kingston, New York. Well, hello neighbor! I’m a nice middle-aged lady who cares about the community! Can we chat for a bit about how concerned we are about cleaning up the Hudson? I’m sure we can agree that it’s very important to protect the environment!

I was surprised by how easily I became this person, this pesky do-gooder, this purveyor of obviousness. My high-school English teachers had instructed me to avoid clichés — if you want people to bother reading you, then you must find an original way to tell the story. This became a guiding principle not just in my writing, but in my speech, too, as it was for all my writer friends in New York City, where I had lived until 2012. There, nearly everyone I knew tried to obey the golden rule of conversation: If you can’t think of something interesting to say, don’t say anything at all.

You can read the full essay at Longreads.

Dear Sara: A few months ago I was out for drinks with two of my friends. Both are married to guys they met in university, so between them they’ve been single for about seven seconds. I was dating more actively then, and I was telling them how I felt like I wasn’t really getting anywhere—lots of messaging back and forth with potential matches that never seemed to turn into actual dates. And they responded to that by telling me I need to stop trying so hard, that love finds people when they least expect it and that maybe I should stop looking. Fast forward to last night, and I’m out again with the same two friends. Except now I’m on a break from dating (by my own choice, not because of the advice they gave before), and what do they say this time? That I’m never going to find someone if I don’t make an effort to put myself out there. Ugghhh! Sometimes you just can’t win! – M (more…)