Lavish Rebellion [DOT COM]

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The humiliating and nightmarish part, she explained to me, was not so much the rejection as being cast against her will as “woman eager for relationship.” In her memoir, “Fierce Attachments,” Vivian Gornick describes the anguish of being ignored by a lover to her female friend: “What I couldn’t absorb,” she writes, “was his plunging us back into the cruelty of old-fashioned man-woman stuff, turning me into a woman who waits for a phone call that never comes and himself into the man who must avoid the woman who is waiting.

The guy dating my friend may have been too busy lawyering to confirm his plans with her, but meanwhile, Anderson might say, my friend was working two jobs: one to earn her living, the other as sole manager of an emotional entanglement that was also his. Heterofatalism is partly just burnout.

The Trouble With Wanting Men by by Jean Garnett, published in The New York Times Magazine

Bobby (Ooh)
And if I have to leave before I’m ready, would you stop me?
Voice inside my head says
“Let him go, let him go, let him go, let him go

“Bobby” by Ravyn Lenae

Nostalgia is easy and often lazy, but Carolyn’s premarriage life, as depicted onscreen, has become a portal for Gen Z-ers and young millennials to glimpse the magic of 1990s New York. Those of us who were there are overwhelmed with a desire to return. At a party, recently, one woman in her 40s from Los Angeles told me, unprompted, that she would pay $10 million to go back to that time and place.

Ms. Bessette (without the Kennedy name drowning her) — with her uncombed blond tresses and chic, easily mimicked (though rarely as successfully) minimalist outfits, her exciting social life — is an alluring avatar for the era.

Carolyn Bessette Was Living the Dream. Then She Met John.

by Glynnis MacNicol for The New York Times‘ Opinion Guest Essay