On Mary Oliver, Freezing Eggs, and Female Friendship
By Wim Langedijk for HURS
On Mary Oliver, Freezing Eggs, and Female Friendship
HUR Reads is our definitive shortlist of the most prominent articles from around the web.
By HURS Team
1
The High Priestess of the Ordinary
Hillary Kelly comes to the defense of Mary Oliver, whose accessible, earnest poetry has long divided critics and readers. Ahead of the documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, Kelly considers how Oliver became a literary phenomenon, her most quotable lines circulating far beyond poetry circles. Rather than diminishing her work, Kelly argues, its usefulness may be precisely the point: an invitation to pay closer attention to how we live.
THE ATLANTIC
Anna Russell considers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to publicly document freezing her eggs, and the debate it has provoked. Beyond the conservative backlash, Russell sees a familiar dilemma: the years when many women reach critical stages in their careers often coincide with narrowing reproductive timelines. By making an ordinarily private calculation visible, Ocasio-Cortez exposes how women are still largely left to negotiate the competing demands of work, family and biology themselves.
THE NEW YORKER
Aimee Lee has spent nearly two decades preserving Hanji, Korea’s centuries-old tradition of handmade paper. After apprenticing with master papermakers in rural South Korea, the Korean American artist brought the painstaking practice to Ohio, transforming paper mulberry bark into sheets, sculptures and woven objects. As generational knowledge of the craft begins to disappear, Lee’s work is as much about transmission as preservation: carrying a tradition across borders while allowing it to evolve.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Artist Lulu MacDonald once gave herself five years to build a sustainable art career or walk away. Now 35, she argues that the premise was flawed. MacDonald challenges the art world’s romantic attachment to the full-time artist, asking why day jobs are treated as creative failure when financial precarity makes them a necessity for so many. A hybrid working life, she suggests, can sustain an artistic practice rather than diminish it.
FRIEZE
Marie Darrieussecq’s How to Make a Woman follows childhood friends Rose and Solange from a Basque village in the 1980s into radically different adult lives. Told through their two perspectives, the novel examines the misunderstandings that can bind a friendship as powerfully as intimacy. Darrieussecq discusses writing female desire, the sexual politics of the 1980s and the Basque Country that continues to shape her fiction.