Laura Jayne Martin's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
The purpose of a party is to have fun together. What better time to have fun than after you’ve endured an inconceivable loss, the rayless depths from which you feel you may never fully ascend? A successful party takes planning and skill. Whether it’s a game party in a home, a birthday party, a dinner party, or just a
Laura Passin's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
There is a difference between normal memory and traumatic memory. Trauma sears images and sensations into your brain: they are as vivid a year later as 10 minutes later, involuntary so. But normal memory is reconstructed each time you access it: soon it is not the memory you recall, but the story of the memory, and then the story of the
My Mother, Who Did Her Best You picked me up when I was down (on the floor, with a busted knee, after playing slip-n-slide in the hallway while you were screwing with the DVR) You knew what was best for me (especially if I was whiny and we were in the car, driving past a McDonald’s) You supported me in all my endeavors (except for that one v-ball game you…
Kate McKean last wrote for The Toast about the malls of her childhood. When I was about eight or nine, I spent a lot of time in our finished basement playing Super Mario Bros. My father had a fancy stereo system that I was scared to touch, but I did know how to do one thing: turn on the 7" reel-to-reel tape player and start the five Beatles albums he'd recorded on the big…
It’s after midnight on a Saturday night in mid-August in upstate New York. My husband signals and turns right onto the ramp to I-87 South. I’m in the passenger seat, trying to sleep and failing miserably. I haven’t drunk any coffee, but adrenaline courses through my veins like caffeine. Just go to sleep already, I tell myself. You have to drive soon. Sleep. Sleep.
I didn’t know it was the last time I was talking to him so I didn’t know to pay attention to everything: the view out the window, the chill in the air, the way that particular moment would come to just smell like finals week of college, the exact rhythms of his voice. Sometimes I go back there and stand next to myself. If I could I would whisper: Skip studying
Deadwood saved my relationship with my dad. Then he died. Like so many of us in the “shows featuring Timothy Olyphant as an angry person with hats and really low-riding jeans” demographic, I love Deadwood. I love its harsh and beautiful language, its complicated female characters, its gut-punching violence, and its Olyphant. Launched in 2004, it features not only T.O. at his sexiest, but the inimitable John Hawkes, Ian McShane, and Robin Weigert. It’s…
The other night, I was wearing my favourite pair of underwear. They're from 2009 and they have a Guinness logo on them and pink edging and I bought them in order to have a truly authentic souvenir of the time I went to Ireland for ten days with my mom's parish (close tab). But, whatever, I really love them and have probably vaguely anthropomorphized them at this point. But if I don't pack them, they…
