Caitlin Flanagan
Caitlin Flanagan
Caitlin Flanaganis an American writer and social critic. A former staff writer at The New Yorker, she is a contributor to The Atlantic. Her book To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife was published by Little, Brown in 2006...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
daughter mother growing-up
My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.
mother california migrants
My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.
girl couple culture
I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.
girl safe limits
Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.
girl fate culture
Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.
mean divorce independence
Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.
smell suitcases lists
To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.
girl teenage boys
Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.
women self becoming
Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.
dog italian islands
What the altar-bound of today end up buying from their numberless vendors is a dog's breakfast of bridal excess - part society wedding of the twenties, part Long Island Italian wedding of the fifties. It's The Philadelphia Story and The Wedding Singer served up together in one curious and costly buffet.
marriage remains engines
Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.
doors self diaries
Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.
daughter mother memories
Mothers ... would do anything to steer their daughter the right way. It is frustrating beyond measure for them when a daughter screams, 'You don't understand, and you'll never understand!' The mother stamps her foot in aggravation, but in this case the daughter is right: the mother doesn't understand. She merely remembers, and memory is separate from experience.
doors circles yellow
Planning a wedding is hell. Things are said. Doors are slammed. Quarrels about the most inconsequential things--yellow tablecloths or white? hors d'oeuvres set out on tables or passed around on trays?--are often pitched at such a level that it seems the combatants may never recover from them. Much of the anxiety, of course, is tribal. It is wrenching to have to open the sacred circle to admit an outsider.