Bread and Bread

If you read my everyone’s a critic post, you can probably guess how much I loved this post on Bluebird Blvd. , in which Courtenay Bluebird assumes the persona of all those magazines that profess to make us (us = especially women) feel better and usually have the opposite effect . It’s enough to make a girl want to retreat to a cabin in the woods and light a giant fireplace fire with magazines as kindling.* Except then I’d get bored and wish for something to read. Can I make a humble addition to Bluebird’s list from my own monthly mail pile? Hi, I’m REDBOOK . I’m a gift from your really nice sister, whose generosity you totally appreciate . I make you feel weirdly middlebrow—and therefore snobby about feeling not good about feeling middlebrow—whenever you read me. Also, old. And then ageist about feeling not good about feeling old. Sometimes I have refreshing, if mildly simplistic, articles about transgender issues and infertility. But this month is my “Confess...

This morning I looked at the Excel file where I track my literary submissions, and let me tell you, there’s nothing like a highly organized document to let you know in no uncertain terms exactly how unproductive you’ve been. Six submissions in the entire year of 2011! Since my unofficial 2012 motto is “Be less lazy and crazy” (my official motto is “What would Tina Fey do?”), I am particularly proud of myself for meeting the postmark deadline for this summer’s RADAR Lab, in which a bunch of queer people shack up in Mexico for two weeks and write together. That’s practically a novel itself. It will be called Vamos a la Playa , Jotos . Anyway, here’s what I read in December, back when I was still being a little lazy (and working my way through The Lacuna , which I’m still not done with). Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling: Mindy Kaling name-checks Tina Fey and Chelsea Handler's books in a self-deprecating way. For the record, Kaling's is much funnier and sweete...