Everyone wants a prestige haunting; no one wants their house haunted by the toilet repair man.

To get this out in the open: I, much like Rob Lowe, believe in ghosts. In my New England hometown, this was probably the one thing about me that didn’t make me an oddity. Everywhere you went, people were just dying to tell you about this ghost or that ghost. And I’m not just talking about, like, mall goths, or the one weirdo science teacher who goes around town on a recumbent bike, either. I hail from the unexpectedly haunted state of Connecticut, where…

This Is Us

When I was 12, my mother and I were in this ongoing argument. She wanted me to grow up to become a trophy wife; I wanted to grow up to write one really cool novel and then die while I was still hot.

I mean, she wasn’t that explicit about it. Whenever the topic of my future came up, she’d begin by naming the only two rich person professions lower-middle-class parents know (doctor and lawyer). It was plain for anyone to see that I had neither the interest nor aptitude to become a member of any of the life-saving professions…

Lived Through This

I never met any happy adults when I was a kid. My parents were miserable, my parents’ friends were miserable, my friends’ parents were miserable, and that was pretty much all the adults I knew. I didn’t know that happy adults were even a thing until I went to college and met people from Oregon.

As a kid, the only real variable I ever noticed among these various miserable adults was the degree of flamboyance they used to express their unhappiness. Some people were low-key about their misery while other people were Don Henley about it. …

This Is Us

If you are anything like me — a 38-year-old who owns multiple DVD copies of Heathers so I can still watch it when the grid goes down and the world becomes The Road, even if one of the cannibals on The Road steals my other copy — you woke up recently to an unwelcome surprise. Timothée Chalamet starred in a Super Bowl car commercial where he portrays the college-age child of Edward Scissorhands and Winona Ryder’s Kim. This commercial begs many questions, including: In the movie, Vincent Price gives Edward his scissorhands as an aid to help in his movement—so…

Hello and welcome to another round-up of stories you may have missed from Atta Girl, a publication for women over 30—women who have, through decades of spiritual growth, philosophical inquiry, and raw life experience, finally figured out how they want to part their hair! Women who got in trouble in the mid-90s for not paying their Columbia House CD Club membership dues, and went on to tell the tale! Women who have lived, damn it!

We’ve collected a few stories you might have missed over the past few weeks. If checking out these stories lights a literary fire within you…

If you’ve spent any amount of time studying biology — by which I mean, if you’ve spent any amount of time getting stoned and watching Blue Planet — you know that nature is all about interdependencies. Our world runs on complex symbiotic relationships: one species gives something, another species takes something else, and the earth continues to spin in its delicate balance until Elon Musk decides he’s gonna nuke the core in order to win a bet with Jeff Bezos.

But in this past year, one of those crucial interdependencies has been knocked off its axis, and prominent researchers are…

Lived Through This

I was running two hours late to work on the day I figured out I was really, truly, finally about to get fired. The whole “two hours late” thing wasn’t, like, an eerie portent of doom or anything. I had been pushing my start time back later and later for months until I was here: waking up at 9:30 for a job that started at 9, then finally swanning into the office at 11, with big black sunglasses and a giant takeout coffee, like I was a glamorous drug addict rock star instead of a writer employed to churn out…

This Is Us

There are moments in life when you wonder how you got here. You know, your classic, “This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful student loan”-type early midlife business, where you’re going about your day and some small moment snags you, pulling you out of the present and into your past, leaving you wondering how you even came to be the person you are.

For me, those moments usually come when I am involved in multiple haunted necklace auctions on eBay. Or when I have to hide my book of crime scene photos because guests are coming…