J. Courtney Sullivan

There's a Dar Williams song about 'houses that are haunted, with the kids who lie awake and think about other generations past who used to use that dripping sink.' I was one of those kids.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.

I know a lot of women who embody what it means to be a feminist but do not want to use that word. The misperceptions about what it's all about have gotten into their heads.

For whatever reason, various outlets and individuals are committed to making the world think that young girls don't talk or care about feminism anymore, that it's totally over. But it's not.

A glimpse at my night stand gives the mostly true impression that I am a book hoarder.

I sometimes read on the subway, but I'm a hopeless eavesdropper and get easily distracted by strangers' conversations.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I'm walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.

In high school, during marathon phone conversations, cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides, I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were, or at least who I thought they might become.

I love the smell of a man's skin.

I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One.

I admire the linear and decisive way a certain kind of man thinks, to my curlicue boundless overthinking.

I've always been drawn to older women.

For my seventh birthday, my parents gave me a plain, unfinished wooden dollhouse. It had six empty rooms, two floors, a staircase, and a door that swung out onto a little front stoop. The windows opened, and the roof retracted on one side, revealing an attic.