Diana Friedman and a friend compare the scars they've collected over many surgeries and years.

By Diana Friedman In 1971, my mother published her first book—a Dell Pocketbook guide to employment for female liberal arts graduates. I spent my childhood watching her hunch over her typewriter, p…

Diana Friedman Gargoyle Online. Reimagining Grief For six days after my father’s death, I’d awoken every morning, powerless to move. My brain and body were both unable to process the reality…

The novelist talks AI, patriarchy, and the frustration of woman-run bake sales. Brooklyn-based writer Amy Shearn has just published her fifth novel, Animal Instinct, a romp of a tale that follows recently divorced 40-something Rachel Bloomstein as…

The memoirist talks marriage, playing with form, and the joy of hanging her final mezuzah. Jennifer Lang’s Places We Left Behind: A Memoir-in-Miniature arrived in my mailbox days after Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. I…

The debut novelist talks Bosnia, Greek tragedy, and finding her voice later in life. Drawing inspiration from Antigone, Anne Burt’s debut novel, The Dig, introduces readers to Antonia King, a driven young woman with a fierce sense of justice.…

The DC attorney talks reproductive freedom, high-risk pregnancy, and life after Roe. From the moment Genevieve Grabman, a Washington, DC-based attorney and public health advocate, learned she was carrying identical twins, nothing about her pregnancy…

For my 60th birthday, I received a prescription for Lipitor and a dildo. The Lipitor was expected. My bad cholesterol/LDL had been creeping upward for years. Advertisement The dildo, au contraire, was quite the surprise. As were the conversations it…

1.Stay up late following your husband on FlightAware as he travels from Miami to Madrid. Imagine him on a half-full Iberia jumbo jet drinking red wine, easing into chat in his native tongue, dozing off to the quiet sounds of Spanish as the plane…

On the train to Madrid today, I wondered: Can I still post on Dispatches from Donosti if I am no longer in Donosti, in fact, not even in Spain, or even Europe? Heading out on a trip that will take me almost 48 hours to get home, it occurred to me I…

As of this last weekend, my mother-in-law has been locked down for one month. Thirty one days, by herself, in her apartment, in a neighborhood called Herrera, on the outer edges of San Sebastian. And while the rest of us, far younger, healthier and…

Beekeeping has always been popular in Maryland, but each year more homeowners, concerned about rapidly declining bee populations, have started to tend bees. According to the Maryland Department of Agriculture, more than 800 new…

My mother-in-law has not left her home since Friday the 13th (no joke). Paying close attention to the news throughout early March, she decided to self-isolate in her apartment a few days before lockdown. Weeks ago she and my son and I made an…

Beekeeper Doris Walsh has served many roles during her 20 years with the Howard County Beekeepers Association (HCBA): mentor, teacher, outreach coordinator, de-facto spokesperson. But she’s performed one more job that’s not exactly typical of your…

Today, Spain went into lockdown. Sort of. We woke up to a gorgeous blue sky, rare around these parts–San Sebastian is in the humid north where it rains a lot, and I mean A LOT. In a state of disbelief, because truly, no one around us looked sick, my…