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
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 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.
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.
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.
family-life survived
It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.
mother children book
I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.
summer children school
I used to teach at a private school, and the parents thought I loved their children. I did not love their children! I liked them well enough, but I was always delighted to see them go off for summer vacation.
girl children teenage
In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist.
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.
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.