Catapult • 28th September 2021

Narrating My Audiobook Felt Like Doing an Impression of Myself

Even the most authentic voice on the page is a translation, a refraction, an altered version of the author’s actual speaking voice. Finding the right balance of refining the voice without losing its character took me years—polishing a sentence until it gleamed and then tweaking it just enough to make it feel real again. Swearing just enough that I still sounded like myself, but not so much that it would be distracting.

Guernica Magazine • 26th April 2021

Coming Home to Somewhere Unfamiliar

I was exuberant with the freedom I’d found, the friends I’d made, the neighborhood where I felt at home for the first time since the blurry memories of early childhood, but just under the surface was a depression that felt like panic. I felt everything, all at once. So I drank and got high so it made sense for me to laugh hysterically until tears ran down my cheeks and then sob until I was red in the face and choking. That turning point between laughter and tears was where I lived all the time, and inebriation was a convenient excuse to let it out.

Literary Hub • 23rd April 2021

Misadventures in J-School: When Grad School is the Wrong Thing

I never thought of it as compensating, I just thought of myself as someone who’d gotten her shit together after an untethered adolescence spent running around the East Village, getting drunk in Tompkins Square Park instead of learning algebra. But then I got accepted to Columbia, the stamp of institutional approval I didn’t realize I’d needed so badly, and I imagined the sweet vindication of becoming a high school drop-out with an Ivy League master’s degree.

Salon • 12th April 2021

My parents were addicted to heroin, and I had a happy childhood. Both of these things are true

Another thing Audrey said that struck me as strange was, "I hope you have some positive memories of him." It took me a moment to realize what she meant, because I have almost exclusively positive memories of him.

KHÔRA • 24th March 2021

Not a Memoir

Three years into the process, I was having trouble adjusting to the idea that I was writing a memoir. I didn’t want to write about myself, I wanted to write about my father. But I couldn’t seem to do one without the other. I wanted to make a book of his art, immortalized images printed cleanly next to the story of his life, a canonization.

Electric Literature • 11th March 2021

Canceling My Book Deal Was the Best Career Move I’ve Ever Made

I think this is a common author mindset: we get into a groove of asking to be let in, a groove so deep it becomes single-minded desperation. We become so fixated on getting the “yes” that we lose sight of the big picture, the real point: finding a publisher that will be a good steward for the work we’ve poured our heart and soul into. Someone we can trust with our life’s work.

3rd March 2021

Watching 'Wojnarowicz' as a Daughter of the East Village Art Scene

I was initially interested in the new documentary, Wojnarowicz, for the glimpse it promised into the 1980s East Village art scene–a time and place that holds great curiosity and sentimentality for me. David Wonarowicz was part of this same short-lived but long-influential art scene as my father, Joe Schactman.

Electric Literature • 20th March 2020

My Book Comes Out Next Year. Do I Even Still Believe in Next Year?

Publishing a book is all about planning ahead. The book I worked on for a decade is coming out in May 2021—supposedly. That’s not so far away, but some days I’m not sure we’ll make it that far.

Catapult • 20th September 2019

Fallen Women (Catapult column)

A monthly column on women coded as villains in pop culture, the power in their badness, and how they shaped fans for good.

Longreads • 16th September 2019

It Comes in Waves

Years after her cousin was killed, Lilly Dancyger is haunted by images of murdered women in the news.

CrimeReads • 15th May 2019

Don’t Use My Family For Your True Crime Stories - What it's like to watch true crime as the relative of a murder victim.

This summer, my cousin Sabina would have turned 30 years old. Instead, it will mark nine years since she was murdered. Though it’s been almost a decade, I’ve just very recently started writing about her, and her death. It always felt too raw, too sacred to pull apart for story fodder—even if I’m the one doing the telling. The thought of someone who didn’t even know her using the horrible, violent way she was taken from my family as “material” is unfathomable to me. This is what I think about whe

OFF ASSIGNMENT • 21st February 2019

In Search of Smoky Cafes: On Anais Nin’s diaries, the creative life, and (not) time-traveling in Paris

I understood of course that time had passed since the 1930s in Paris just like it had in New York, that many of the same problems likely existed there. But in a much more visceral way, it was easy to believe that the uncorrupted, smoky, jazz-filled utopia of Nin’s Paris was a real place I could travel to if I wanted it badly enough.

Catapult • 7th June 2018

How I Learned to Stop Judging And Love Insta-Witches

When I was thirteen, I discovered witchcraft. More accurately, I started paying attention to it. It had always been around me, in the silk-wrapped tarot deck on my mother’s dresser, and the sage she burned every time we moved into a new apartment. But when I was thirteen, I dove in and studied with a hunger and dedication I had never applied to anything before, and one that I never quite matched again; not even when I went to graduate school ten years later.

The Rumpus • 5th March 2018

Passing as Privileged (Excerpt from "Without A Net" Anthology)

As I awkwardly wiped condensation from my plastic cup of wine onto my dress slacks, it occurred to me that I’d done such a good job of making something of myself that I’d made my past invisible.

Washington Post • 18th October 2017

Summer love story: The memory of one kiss can last more than a season

The summer I turned 20, I was drinking a Long Island iced tea in a bar in the East Village when a slender, dark-haired guy about my age asked me, in an Irish accent, what there was to do in the neighborhood.

Washington Post • 18th October 2017

Planning a wedding made me reevaluate every relationship in my life

At the top of the page, I wrote, “Mom.” Then the names of my four closest girlfriends: Liz, Leah, Carly and Courtney. Then my best guy friend; I’d asked him to be my best man years before I knew whom I’d marry. (My husband picked a best man, too.) Then came my aunt’s names and so on until I’d listed the 25 people I love the most, in descending order.

The Forward • 18th October 2017

How Judaism Still Brings My Father Closer to Me

Shortly after my mother left him, my father started going to synagogue regularly for the first time in his life. He would bring 7-year-old me with him on Friday nights as the official start to our weekends together, usually followed by banana splits at Baskin-Robbins.

Washington Post • 16th October 2017

I could have been the little boy in the overdose photos

A photo recently blazed across the Internet: an Ohio couple in a car, both passed out, having overdosed on opiates. The woman in the passenger’s seat is pale and ashen. Her head is lolled over to one side, her mouth agape. She looks dead. It’s a deeply disturbing image, even before you notice the child in a car seat behind her, looking right into the camera.

Psychology Today • 10th October 2017

Dance With a Demon

I was eight the first time my father and I spoke about heroin. He was working on a sculpture, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his curly hair hanging down over his face. I stood at his bookshelf, perusing the thick art volumes. Tucked between the pages of one, I found a piece of tinfoil folded into a square and marked with small circular burns.

Ravishly • 10th October 2017

Wearing Dead People’s Clothing

It’s not unusual to keep talismans of people we’ve lost — often jewelry given as gifts by the deceased while they were still alive, or sometimes inherited. Photographs, letters. But wearing a dead person’s clothing (not clothing that they gave to you while they were living, but articles that they put on their bodies while those bodies still breathed) provides a feeling of corporeal closeness that’s hard to replicate.