I miss the OS community, and unless things change here, I will not be returning to the site anytime soon.  I do hope that OS survives, but I'm too frustrated in dealing with pages that won't load, and hardly any new posts out there to enjoy.

 For now I am… Read full post »

A year ago I went to Susie Bright’s reading for her memoir, Big Sex Little Death.  She signed my copy “Lauren, Clits up!  Susie Bright.”  She told some interesting stories/… Read full post »

““You don’t really want to be a poet.  First of all, if you’re a woman, you have to be three times as good as any of the men.  Secondly, you have to fuck everyone.  And thirdly, you have to be dead.” – a male poet, in conversation (Jong, 43)”… Read full post »

            I had a dream the other night, that I was one of three siblings.  One sibling had stripped our father of his skin to see how we are made.  He was laid out on a gurney, and we looked at the red layers of muscle, studying/… Read full post »

You may remember that I wrote a post a while back about making my living as an Art Model.  I’ve been modeling now for the past eighteen months, and I actually receive more work than I can handle.  It’s strange that all of my previous jobs gave me anxiety, but for/… Read full post »

I just finished reading My Apprenticeships, by Colette - the French novelist and performer born in 1873, most famous for the novel Gigi.  My love for the writing of Colette has always felt like a guilty pleasure – like intensely dark chocolate, a r/… Read full post »

After watching the excellent film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, I had no choice but to pick up Dalma Heyn’s book, The Erotic Silence of the American Wife. 

In the film, Pippa marries a wealthy… Read full post »

The question we all have as human beings is “what lies beyond our limit?”  We just watched the film Another Earth where humans are faced with the perplexing realization that there is another earth mirroring our own, even another self completely synchronized with us.

In reality… Read full post »

Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is so rich with lyrical prose that I had to read the first page three times before moving on to the next.  She flips back and forth effortlessly between a deep southern African American dialect into literary narration.  … Read full post »

            It’s hard to remember the first six years of your life, but according to Oliver James in They F*** You Up – How To Survive Family Life, those first years and how our parents relate to us, define us more than genes.

    &n… Read full post »

            Last Sunday, at the bookstore, I saw the name ‘Emily Gould’ in red letters on the spine of a book in the memoir section.  I don’t forget the names of editors I worked with briefly as a literary agent.  Back then Emily was an e/… Read full post »

            Esther Freud’s novel, Hideous Kinky, is a semi-autobiographical novel of two sisters traveling with their hippy mother through 1960’s Morocco.  Freud is the daughter of the famous figurative painter, Lucian Freud, and the granddaughter o/… Read full post »

            I am feeling vulnerable.  The pitch for my memoir is about to be sent out to editors, and I have spent the last ten years pouring everything I have into this book.  It has evolved and grown with time, and thanks to rejections of past versions,/… Read full post »

            I once had a professor who said, “You live one life, but you have many lives within it.”  The same can be said for a book of short stories.  They are all unique, but each story is connected, and wouldn’t be complete without th/… Read full post »

Two months ago, I bought a necklace with a black metal pendant cut in the image of Hunter S. Thompson.  Ever since then, his spirit has been following me around, reminding me to “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”  More even, than his words on the paper,/… Read full post »

            The minute I heard that Andras Jones had his book Accidental Initiations published, I was magnetized and couldn’t resist the pull.  It arrived in the mail, and I dropped what I was reading to dive right in.  It is strange and kind of wond/… Read full post »

In E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel Ragtime we are taken into the vulnerabilities and motivations behind such historical figures as Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and Emma Goldman.  We are witness to the making of revolutionaries and criminals.  War is on the horizon – the gr/… Read full post »

            Imagine you are living in a universe where everything is pink, every girl is a princess, and men are vague figures on the periphery, only appearing when a girl needs saving.  This to me sounds like a nightmare, and yet little girls are taught that t/… Read full post »

    In Alix Kates Shulman’s 1972 novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Sasha fights against the traps of being a woman.  As a child, the boy’s are pure enemies.  She is attacked, held down and pantsed so the boys can stare at her vagina/… Read full post »

            I once had a friend who was a famous child star.  I will protect her identity out of respect and call her Amy.  We both worked at a restaurant, and every now and then, super fans would appear to gush and beg her to sign an/… Read full post »

            In my junior year of college, I had the opportunity to tour Western Europe in a student group.  We traveled through Rome, Florence, Venice, Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Normandy, Paris, and London for three weeks, and I chose to extend my stay for two/… Read full post »

Growing up, I never really talked to any boys until I slept with one.  And by that time, they were no longer really boys - especially since I was twenty-one and I gravitated to older men.

            In my senior year of college, there was/… Read full post »

            In Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, set in 19th Century France, Frederic is obsessed with Madame Arnoux, the wife of his friend.  It takes him years to gain her confidence and she eventually grows to love him too, but refuses to give/… Read full post »

A picture was posted on Facebook, “Twins in the Womb – Hey Brother!  Do you think there is life after birth?  Do you believe in Mom? – Nah!  I’m an/… Read full post »

               The first thing I noticed when I picked up my used copy of Platform by Michel Houellebecq, were the bits of jizz on the edges, making the pages stick together.  Not surprising, given the amount of orgy scenes. 

Houellebecq’s… Read full post »