Is it appropriate, in a work of autofiction, to ask, Which part is the fiction? I think it is. Because of how people read. The great thing about fiction is it frees the author of the ethical considerations of autobiography and memoir. When people read something that’s about something that actually happened they read one way. When they read about something that’s not supposed to have...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from TUESDAY, FEB 28, 2006 His relatives talk about “fags” and say girls in miniskirts deserve to be raped. Dear Cary, I have met a lovely guy at last after years of being single or dating disastrous men. I am now happy and secure and this man wants to marry me and...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from THURSDAY, JAN 30, 2003 My boyfriend promised we’d be engaged by Christmas but we weren’t. Should I let it go or move out? Dear Cary, I have been dating my boyfriend for four years, and living with him for most of that time. We started (I think mutually) to...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from WEDNESDAY, JUL 20, 2005 I didn’t want to start a fight, so I told her it wasn’t so bad. But I hate what she’s doing. What should I do? Dear Cary, I am trying to be a good liberal parent who stays aware of what her 16-year-old daughter...
Cary’s classic column from THURSDAY, FEB 22, 2007 Someone took a dump on my early-’90s blue subcompact. I feel targeted and I don’t know what to do with my anger. Dear Cary, OK, so a couple of weeks ago, somebody took a big, runny dump on the hood of my car, parked on the street near my house. Gross. Really, really gross. I assumed it was just a disgusting yet random act, donned rubber gloves and...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from Tuesday, Mar 8, 2005 I’d like to stop drinking, but does that mean completely? All week long? Dear Cary, It seems like every other letter you answer has implications of alcoholism. The common theme that I see in your letters is that people can get by...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from THURSDAY, JUL 15, 2010 I’m afraid to go into the bathroom, because of things that happened in childhood Dear Cary, You recently wrote about when “to change your life.” I think I’m there now. And it isn’t a problem with my problem that I’m writing about. Where I...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Hi Cary, I hope you’ll remember what this is about. I wrote last year about falling in love with the wrong person at college, an atheist Jew, the polar opposite of what my conservative Muslim family has always wanted for me. I wrote about worrying about telling my parents, and...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from THURSDAY, SEP 12, 2013 Can a devout Muslim and a Jewish atheist have a happy marriage? Hi Cary, I was born in the States to a conservative Muslim Indian family. My mother, younger brothers and I moved back to India when I was around 11, while my (very...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from TUESDAY, APR 8, 2008 It’s not like I picked him up off the street. I’ve known him for 20 years. Once he was my boyfriend. Cary, I made the mistake of letting a homeless man move in with me. Now I can’t get rid of him. I’ve known this man for over 20 years. At...
Dear reader, Now I feel like my dad. My dad grew up in a time way before mine, as dads tend to do. He would make allusions and we kids wouldn’t get them. “What? Who was Gracie Allen?” “Why,” my father would say, “she was George Burns’ partner!” Good old Burns and Allen. These days you can’t really know who knows what. A noted novelist of my...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from Friday, Feb 6, 2004 I’m married to a wonderful man, but he doesn’t seem to share my fear of financial humiliation. Dear Cary, I have been spoiled with a very happy life. I am 26, married to a wonderful 34-year-old man whom I love more than anyone in the...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from Wednesday, Apr 16, 2008 Now my life is all screwed up and nothing works. Dear Cary, I turn 31 in a couple of weeks, and I feel like I’m unable to get my life together. I thought I would’ve had things sorted out by now, but I don’t. I don’t feel a whole lot more...
I write from passion and desperation; my heritage is as a punk and a hippie, a fan of visionary and beat poetics, a lover of revolutionaries and rebels. I also am drawn to the severe aesthetics of writers like Nabokov and Wallace Stevens. I straddle worlds. But let’s have a little context. The Friday before the Jan. 10, 2015, Poets and Writers Live event at the Brava Theater in San...
I felt so strongly about reaching out to San Francisco writers at the Poets & Writers Live event, such a strong sense of localness that I found myself staying up late the night before writing this long screed, pouring out my heart in the matter of what it’s like to be in San Francisco today, having moved from the Mission to the Outer Sunset, having seen Salon.com move its operations to...
Dear Cary, Please help me process my murderous rage – a rage i suspect others share as well. I’m sorry you don’t seem to be on Salon anymore. You were pretty much the only reason I bothered with that site so I haven’t been in ages. I’m not 100% sure whether you’re still doing this advice thing or what the new protocol is, your site seems to indicate...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from SUNDAY, NOV 22, 2009 I think I’m a writer, but fear paralyzes me Dear Cary, I feel paralyzed and stuck in a rut. I recently graduated from college without a clear path and a hazy focus at best; I am lost and confused and can recognize that I self-sabotage any...
Hi! It’s me, Cary! How ya doin? I’m out of the pool eating toast and thinking about the novel. I’m committed to finishing by the end of May. I have it all planned out. It’s practically done! Finally. Plus yesterday I finished my application to Yaddo, thanks to my Finishing School commitment. It was a long day but I got it done before my 6pm writing coaching appointment...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from FRIDAY, JUL 15, 2005 Mom and Dad say if I don’t lose weight, they won’t find me an apartment for grad school. Dear Cary, I am a 24-year-old young man who lives with his parents in a wealthy suburb of a major American city. I graduated from college three years...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from WEDNESDAY, OCT 8, 2008 It’s taken me a long time to accept what my therapist has been pushing at — but I think I’m ready to act in my own interest. Dear Cary, I’m troubled. At long last, my therapist did something I sensed she meant to do a long time ago...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from Thursday, Dec 16, 2010 The avalanche of presents leaves me cold, but I feel guilty for opting out Dear Cary, I know this is a trivial problem but I’m fretting about it. I am single and I usually see my sister and her family at Christmas. There are eight...
Dear Cary, My husband of 16 years and I have never made an official list, but it’s always been accepted that were we to have, in some fantasyland, the opportunity to sleep with a certain few adored famous people, the sin would be exonerated. (I should mention here that over the years both of us have had our indiscretions with plain old normals, and while the aftermath has never been fun...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from Wednesday, Oct 15, 2008 I shouldn’t have looked in her diary, but maybe it’s best that I did. Dear Cary, This summer, my girlfriend went to Central America for three months. She was in spotty contact with me the whole time, saying it was difficult to...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from SUNDAY, APR 10, 2011 We talked and I thought he was up for this, but now it looks like he never was Dear Cary, I am a 33-year-old married mother of one. While the discussion of having more children was always sort of tabled for my husband and me, after hearing...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from Wednesday, Oct 12, 2005 How can someone so special on the Internet be such a drag in real life? Dear Cary, I have this friend. Let’s call her Susan. Susan and I became friends online several years ago, through mutual (in person) friends. For several...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from THURSDAY, AUG 6, 2009 I thought I could learn to love being a stepmom, but I don’t Dear Cary, I’m probably one of the most unromantic people who ever lived, and have always cringed when someone says they found their “soul mate” or their “one and only,” because...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from TUESDAY, OCT 9, 2007 I’ve been a cheater since my very first boyfriend and no one has ever found out. Cary, I am a cheater. I’ve never had a boyfriend or husband that I didn’t cheat on. When I was younger, it would just be making out behind a boyfriend’s back;...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from Friday, Sep 30, 2005 We’ll sit around with nothing to say, eating takeout food. Dear Cary, I know this is pretty early, but I’m already freaking out about hanging out with my family during Christmas. My family consists of my mother, my father, my brother and...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from FRIDAY, JUL 8, 2005 I fathered a child when I was a screwed-up loser and kept it secret all these years. Dear Cary, Boy, did I screw up. About 13 years ago, I fell for a friend of my sister’s and got her pregnant. I was at this point in my life a loser. I had...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from Tuesday, Nov 30, 2010 I put my boyfriend through hell. How can I stop? Dear Cary, My problem is that I’m a pretty crappy girlfriend. I have been in a relationship for over a year with someone that I really care about. He and I met in graduate school and have...
So here is another thing. Seth Myers is interviewing Joe Hill and I am watching from my perch high and far away on my mysterious island of emotional distance and contempt and it is as if the older I get the more godlike I am because there is nothing that surprises me and I cannot be seduced by the son of Stephen King and I am charmed by nothing; I have attained the weary omniscience of a god ...
So after taking some time off I felt drawn to connect with others in the world who are suffering and so began again reading letters and writing. I am perplexed and moved by this letter, and as frequently has been the case, I wish I knew more, but the details, I decided, are for the letter writer to clarify for herself. We don’t need to know the details. Only she does. Dear Cary, I...
I had always swung for the fences. Swinging for the fences means doing the absolute best job I could, every day. That meant spending four to six hours a day at the keyboard, trying and retrying, phrasing and rephrasing, searching for the right answer, looking for at least one bright linguistic spot, one trope that would make the column ring, that would elevate it above the dross and sloppy speech...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from THURSDAY, JUN 25, 2009 We got caught making out and now my mom’s all like you have to break up with him if you want to keep living here Dear Cary, My name is V and I’m 18 years old. I have a boyfriend and he’s 18 years old too, but the situation here is that my...
I am not going to edit this. I am just going to write from the heart and the mind and the memory. Writing for money and writing as a cultural activity are not the same thing and there is rarely a happy relationship between the two but every once in a while they come together and when that happens a writer is wise to leap for joy. It has happened for me only once or twice. I have known since I...