Life & Love

For many of us, the last year was as clarifying as it was challenging, with isolation and grief sharpening our focus on what truly matters. The things we thought made up a life were forcibly supplanted by the things that actually do: it became, quite suddenly, deathly important to find joy anywhere—in blossoms that appeared

Before the pandemic, Kristen Wilson, 33, was a reluctant gym-goer whose discomfort in fitness environments caused years of unpleasant experiences. In group classes, she’d push herself to the point of pain, overextending because she didn’t want to look out of place among the workout zealots beside her. “Even yoga, which is supposed to be relaxing,

Carly Leahy went into 2020 with a plan: She’d get married to Charlie, her fiancé of nearly two years, and then down the line the two would try to have children. Instead, the 31-year-old co-founder of the reproductive health company Modern Fertility was met with a global pandemic, an unexpected pregnancy, a cancer diagnosis for

Before her viral essay grappling with the death of her mother and Korean American identity, Michelle Zauner was best known for her work as a musician—she’s released two albums and toured the world with her Philadelphia-based band, Japanese Breakfast. (The band’s third album, Jubilee, is set for release this June.) Her book Crying in H

Mother’s Day has been celebrated for over 100 years now, but it feels especially meaningful after the year we’ve all been through. Now’s the time, as the weather shifts from brisk to balmy, to express your gratitude for the woman who gave you life. And yet: Moms (and grandmas, aunts, wives, cousins, sisters, and friends)

What if you could speed past the endless “How r u”s, bathroom mirror selfies, and interminable texting to get right to the good stuff: A relationship with a decent person who can form complete sentences and seems genuinely interested in more than your tatas. I know what you’re thinking, Is there an app for that?

Over the phone, Vanessa is telling me about her upcoming Sayulita, Mexico vacation. There’d be a house with a pool, another house “in the hills,” a bunch of people, and long, lazy days spent drinking and hanging out. I’m doing my best to actively listen while my 3.5-year-old daughter is jumping on me, gleefully yelling

Once, in the span of a single conversation, a friend nearly two decades older than I am and I realized we were both running out of time. I clearly was not going to have my life “figured out” by age 25 or 30 or whatever the appropriate marker is. While she was grappling with the

Imagine walking into a crowded bar. A crowded bar full of unmasked people, talking and laughing and breathing and spewing aerosol particles into the air without the threat of an airborne virus looming over the room. We should be stoked, right? This no longer feels like a far-off fantasy. The mass tragedy of COVID-19, where

On March 16, a series of shootings within a single hour at three massage parlours in Atlanta, Georgia left eight people dead, including six Asian women. At the time this was published, only the names of those killed in the first attack have been released. They include Xiaojie Tan, 49; Daoyou Feng, 44; Delaina Ashley

Content warning: suicidal ideation To the outside world, I lived a perfect life. My toy company, Melissa & Doug, which I founded in 1988 alongside my husband, Doug Bernstein, had grown from a tiny operation run out of Doug’s parents’ garage into a half-billion dollar business. Doug and I had been married for over thirty

When my marriage ended more than a decade ago, all parties assumed my ex and I would adopt the standard-issue divorce package: The kids would stay with me to provide the stability of a primary home, while he got weekend visits and I received child support. That was what the attorneys laid out as the

By winter, “the Millinocket wedding” had basically become shorthand for a “coronavirus superspreader event.” Stories about COVID-19 that ran in local papers were sometimes accompanied by a photo of the Big Moose Inn Cabins & Campground for no other reason than that everyone associated the one with the other. Keirnan Monaghan and Theo Vamvounakis The

My apartment building in Washington Heights, Nuevayol, has not had gas during this entire pandemic, and it looks like this will last for another long stretch of months. This means: no oven and no stove. The hotplate given to us by management is crappy by dormroom standards—the HI-MED-LOW markings scratched off within a day so…

Last June, as my Mother walked out of Lincoln Hospital, where she’s the head OB-GYN nurse, four white trucks lined the Bronx facility’s facade. She asked a coworker standing at the street corner, “Are those them? Are those the trailers?” The woman turned and nodded. “Yeah, those are like the mortuaries now.” They were refrigerated

The first pronghorns appear in the meadow in June—three adults and two twig-legged newborn fawns, all of them the same tawny gold as the wild grasses they lounge in and graze, with crisp white patches on their cheeks, throats, chests, and bellies. They’re watching me with their binocular vision, ready to run at the slightest

Back in 2019, I traveled a lot for work. I lived out of my carry-on and slept in hotel rooms almost 200 nights out of the year. In a typical week, I never cooked, rarely had more than two nights in a row in my own bed, and ordered a lot of takeout. Now, not

Courtesy Mary-Louise Parker She would have read this first. So many times, when I finished writing something, I either sent it to her or dumped it in the trash. Technically, she kept me from throwing away much of my life after trying to make sense of it on paper. She won’t be reading this one.

Kristen Radtke This story is part of ELLE’s Lost and Found: One Year in Quarantine. Click here to read all the stories in this package. Kristen Radtke Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (2017), and the forthcoming books Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (July 2021),

For the past year, we’ve been living in what has been endlessly dubbed our “new normal.” In our “new normal,” we stay inside. We don’t see people we don’t live with, and when we do, it’s with masks on and at least six feet apart. In our “new normal,” we cancel our gym subscriptions, our

I’m sitting upstairs, trying to work, but loud guffaws keep emanating from downstairs. “I’m sorry,” I say to the person on the other end of the call. “It’s my son.” My Mother is giggling, and my 18-month-old son is emitting the loudest belly laughs you’ve ever heard. “A hat!” she says, in a singsong that

Almost one year ago to the day, my colleagues and I left our office for the last time—not knowing it would be the last time, for a long time. The intervening year has left plenty of us feeling the enormous weight of loss—of loved ones or dear friends, of time and experiences out in the

On February 3, nearly four months after she lost her third child, Jack, to pregnancy complications at 20 weeks, Chrissy Teigen shared that she was experiencing what felt like baby kicks in her uterus. “My little Jack would have been born this week so I’m a bit off,” Teigen tweeted. “I truly feel kicks in

It was a Monday. I dropped ice cream on my kitchen floor and struggled for hours to clean up. By Tuesday, it felt like things were constantly slipping out of my hands. By Wednesday, typing had become difficult. I found myself making more and more unexplained errors in my emails and messages to friends and