Anne Thériault

I’m trying to tell myself that I’m not failing, just taking the long way around.

Teach your son to be kind to himself. Teach him to be kind to other people. Teach your son that his body is good for all kinds of things.

I don’t tell anyone right away because I feel like it is my fault – my fault for being too loud, too outspoken, too obviously a parent.

I write a lot about mental health, and I think a lot of people assume that I love Sylvia because we’re both part of the Depressed Ladiez club.

I know what it must sound like to you whenever those ugly words start pouring out of me.

The love that you put out into the world will not last forever, ricocheting between atoms, shifting shape as needed. A thoughtless heart can stop your love cold.

Late last week the New York Times published an article titled Antidepressant Paxil Is Unsafe for Teenagers, New Analysis Says. After reading it through twice, I sent the link to my friend.

You. Sometimes I wonder about you. I wonder, for instance, where you came from. I understand the dry facts, of course, the complex mechanics of ovulation and ejaculation.

The main problem with life is that it goes on. And on. And on. People say that like it’s supposed to comfort you.

Don’t listen to people who want to peddle some kind of elite ideal of what it means to write; don’t buy into the idea that you can only refer to yourself as a writer if you’ve been published in the New Yorker or you have a stack of rejection letters a foot deep or you frequently stay up all night weeping softly into a glass of scotch because you can’t arrange exactly the right words in exactly the right order to say exactly whatever it is you want to stay.

Everything suddenly revolves around this tiny, helpless little being, and all of the familiar road-markers of your old life have suddenly disappeared.

You think that one of the goals of the feminist movement should be to make men feel safer or more comfortable about feminism.