MORE FROM HUFFPOST
MORE FROM HUFFPOST
joyce maynard
Does it always involve a power imbalance? Some say yes, others say not at all.
Forty six years ago, when I was an 18-year-old Yale freshman, my scholarship job was to clear away the dishes three nights a week in the Yale Law School dining hall. I have little doubt that among those whose plates and silverware I picked up were Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton.
Nobody was calling me an alcoholic. Just a person who enjoyed her wine. I just did what countless numbers of women do all around me. And part of the danger lay in that: how totally acceptable it all looked.
I was 12-years-old, which would make the year 1966 -- and I was home alone, except for my father, who was upstairs asleep. But he was not so much sleeping as passed out. Knock at the door: a police officer. 'Do you know anything about the Oldsmobile outside?' he asked me.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
WHAT'S HAPPENING
I never got drunk . I was just 'taking the edge off'. But I also recognized that reaching for a glass of wine, or three, had become my response to stress or sorrow in my life. And like most women I know -- most human beings -- there was generally plenty of that.
As book lovers, we tend to be skeptical about film adaptations, but we are fans of both the thirteen books on this list and their cinematic counterparts. Read the book, then stream the movie. Netflix is a marvelous thing.
Crossing the threshold from unpublished to published author was a similar journey for me: I had to keep pounding on that door until, one crack at a time, it gave way. There was no one lucky break. It was more like a hundred of them.
In images, majestic volcanoes rise from the edge of inky waters; the lake appears mysterious, haunting. The deepest lake in Central America, Atitlan had been described by friends as a vortex, a portal, the bellybutton of Mayan civilization.
Great consideration needs to be given as to whether reducing the stigma of giving up on adopted children would not inadvertently result in encouraging more terminations, turning adoption into a trial and give-back program as if children come with warranties.
When the editor called to say she liked the essay and wanted to buy it, I was convinced it was a friend playing a trick. It wasn't. In fact, the editor wanted to know if I had any other essays to show her.
