Jessica Ferri

We’ve all been there — scanning the 100 best books ever list and thinking, really? I read that book when I was 15 and it was a struggle to get through the first 20 pages. Those long nights you spent reading (or not reading) your assigned text trying…

How many times have you been told men are stronger than women — that it’s a “biological fact”? This ardent feminist and lover of Serena Williams has always been frustrated that women are some how considered to be lesser athletes (and, basically,…

Joan Didion is more than just a great writer; she’s an icon. Since Slouching Towards Bethlehem came out in 1968, Didion has gained a steady cult following, which was only intensified by the publication of her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking in…

The most famous of Joan Didion’s quotes is probably “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” which is from from The White Album. Any writer knows this to be true. From an early age, writing was always something Joan Didion knew she wanted to…

Are there days where you just can’t even? Did the season finale of Game of Thrones just push you right over the edge? We’ve all been there — relationship problems, gender confusion, female friendships, fear of death, unemployment, family matters,…

When I first read one of Joan Didion's essays in high school, I rushed to the nearest bookstore and bought both Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, two collections of nonfiction. Both books focused on California in the 1960s, an alien…

Everyone remembers Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose from 2002's The Hours. That portrayal of Virginia Woolf led her to Oscar gold. It's a testament to the fact that the lives of writers are a source of fascination for audiences everywhere. There is…

February is a bittersweet time for Sylvia Plath fans. It's the anniversary of her suicide — she took her life on February 11, 1963 — but it's also the same month during which she published the incredible Ariel, her final collection of poems. (She…

The “Great Feminist Men” of Literature are an anemic bunch — their records are marred by some pretty questionable moral choices, which aren't the most feminist of actions, admittedly. However, the guys I picked for this list do get points for their…

It seems like only yesterday that my buddy Lisa and I were bundled up in her dorm room watching her rickety VHS recorded-from-TV copy of Little Women (the version starring Winona Ryder, of course) squealing over Jo's rejection of Christian Bale—I…