Theo Pauline Nestor

David Chelsea
To celebrate Modern Love’s 15th anniversary this month, we’re publishing a series of special features — three classic essays from the column’s early years and four conversations with writers whose stories were adapted for the television series that began streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Oct. 18.
This week we present the third Modern Love essay ever published, Theo Pauline Nestor’s bracing account of divorce, which swamped our inboxes with email, our first glimpse of the column...

“Talk about women showing up for women!” the director of the University of Washington’s Graduate Lecture Series said to a sold-out auditorium at Anita Hill’s Nov. 6 lecture, and then she told us the most surprising thing: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford would be introducing Hill.
Ford walked out onto the Seattle stage, and the crowd leapt up. Applause and cheers filled the room, transforming the staid academic atmosphere instantly into a ticker-tape parade. We’d come out to see a hero from a long-a...

The writer Theo Pauline Nestor joins the Sugars to share her own experiences as a stepdaughter. Ms. Nestor is the author of “How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed: A Memoir of Starting Over” and “Writing Is My Drink.”

Recognizing our grief as a common experience is just one of the many therapeutic aspects of writing. When we write down our experiences, we often feel immediately lighter, less burdened by grief’s weight. Writing also gives us the opportunity to archive those special experiences we want to protect and memorialize. Skill or “talent,” or even the ability to spell well, are not required to employ writing as a strategy in the healing process. Writing our way through recovery is available to all of us — no prior writing experience necessary.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

The first thing you notice upon arrival at a Taylor Swift concert is the women, lots and lots of women. And girls, lots and lots of girls. Clusters of women; happy knots of girls in Taylor-esque styling of high-waisted shorts, bandeaus, lined eyes, and fire-engine red lipstick. Upon closer examination of these swirling eddies of females, you can’t help but see that among these groups, mother/daughter combos abound. This is a special night out — and not an inexpensive one — for these moms and ...

Winner 2020 Summer Writing Contest

When I was a professor at a community college, students came to my office pretending to ask about a paper and ended up telling me about their breakups. The first few times it happened I was surprised, but then I came to expect these visits. I kept a copy of How to Survive the Loss of a Love in my desk and offered it to students who seemed like they might be receptive to its advice. I remember a particularly burly football player who came to return the book, saying in a hushed voice, “It’s like the book could see right into me.”

LAST SUMMER, I SUDDENLY became acutely aware of the swift passing of time. My younger daughter, Grace, would be a high school senior in just a few months and then headed to college. The inevitability of her departure ushered in a desire to make time stand still, or at the very least to wring every moment out of every day. My thoughts went swiftly to New Mexico, the place I’d moved to at 21, when I was just a few years older than Grace, a place where I knew that time could stand still in the s...

Miles Davis once said, “Sometimes you have to play for a long time to be able to play like yourself.” And while Davis was talking about music, the very same could be said about writing. Part of what I found most frustrating in my long apprenticeship period as a writer was that not only were my stories and essays not nearly as good on the page as I’d imagined them in my head, they also sounded somehow phony to me. I could hear in my carefully wrought sentences how very hard I was trying—

When you divorce as a forty-two-year-old mother of two, you can almost see the trajectory of your dating life stretching out before you, as solid and real as your seven-year-old car and your century-old house. As you file away the notarized papers decreeing your solitude legal, you know with complete certainty that you will be totally alone for several months or maybe even a year with not even an occasional thought of your romantic future.

The New Beyoncé Gives Women and Mothers Permission ...

Natalie Goldberg & Julia Cameron, bestselling authors of landmark books on unleashing creativity, both found inspiration in their adopted home state of New Mexico.
Attend Writing Intensive with Cameron and Goldberg December 6
Inspired by writing this article, Theo Pauline Nestor created the Black...

For the Teen Who Has Everything: The Badass Feminis...

To love the work of an artist or writer you believe has not received due recognition is its own special hell. You’re doomed to an infinite loop of recitation as you eternally rattle off X’s accomplishments and chant reminders of the existence of X. For me, X = Lynda Barry.
While many will register recognition of Barry’s name and some will even mutter a yeah, she’s great, few seem to fully grasp her genius and realize that before comics were cool and women could fancy themselves cartoonists, a...

All The Pepper Spray In The World Can’t Keep Our Da...

Divorce Is The Worst is the book you should bravely buy for your divorcing friend. You could leave it in your friend’s car after you go out for tea with him. You could go by her house with a casserole (divorce is like a death; we need the casseroles), and in the bag with the lasagna, the wine, th...