Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem, and Two Kinds of Feminism
Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem died eight days apart this month, and admittedly, I didn't know much about either of them beyond the headlines — Dolly's rhinestones, "I Will Always Love You," and the free books she mailed to kids for decades; Gloria's aviators, Ms. Magazine, and a life spent advocating for women's rights. So I did a deep dive, and a PBS NewsHour piece on their deaths put it so eloquently it bears repeating: "One shaped and delivered the language of feminism. The other rejected the label but showed how feminism can be done."
Steinem said the word out loud her whole life, founded Ms. Magazine, and told the National Press Club in 2013, "If we each have a torch, there's a lot more light." Dolly never actually said it, and when someone asked her flat out whether she considered herself a feminist, she said, "No, I do not," then mentioned she'd "never met a man whose ass I couldn't kick if he didn't treat me with the right respect" — which honestly tells you everything the label was supposed to mean in the first place.
Steinem called her one anyway, putting Dolly on the cover of Ms. in 1987 and writing, "If feminism means each of us finding your unique power, and helping other women do the same, Dolly Parton certainly has done both," though Dolly never really returned the favor in public (and never needed to).
I think about that now, as someone who's spent years trying to make women's health sound more like a person than a mission statement. The truth is, you don't have to use the words to be doing the work. You just have to actually be doing it.
Heavy on the Trauma, Hold the Small Talk
Call it PMS, or call it my complete inability to engage in small talk, but somehow I often feel lonely amongst a large group of friends.
You would never know it. I'm (mostly) an extrovert, and I usually appear completely calm, cool, and collected (even, dare I say, funny) in bigger groups.
But I hate small talk, and I find myself in my comfort zone with individual friendships. Put me in a backyard birthday party with twelve women I genuinely like, and I'll laugh at the right moments, ask about the bathroom renovation, nod along about sports schedules, and somewhere around minute forty, go somewhere else in my head — not because I don't care, but because I'm wondering who here would actually tell me the real version of how they're doing if I could just get them alone by the drink table for four minutes.
So I looked it up. Turns out it's not just me being weird, and there's real data behind it. A replicated version of the famous "eavesdropping on happiness" study found that people who have more substantive, one-on-one conversations report greater life satisfaction. Small talk isn't the villain; it just doesn't move the needle. It's not toxic, just filler. I don't need to defend it. I need less of it, and more of the real kind in its place.
And loneliness, researchers keep finding, was never really about how many people are in the room — it's about whether any of them actually see you in it. I can be surrounded by women who would drop everything for me and still leave a party feeling like I said nothing authentic all night.
Give me someone’s trauma, her rising sign, the whole absurdly specific version of her life, and I'll take that over small talk every time.
What I'm Reading This Fall (Besides My Group Chat)
If you've been here any amount of time, you already know I'm a voracious reader. I spent the early part of my career in publishing, and I truly believe there's no right or wrong way to read a book (I mean, who made you the Mayor of Books™?!).
I said earlier that "sweata weatha" is my Super Bowl, and that's partly because fall also happens to be the best season for newly released books. Here's what I'm excited about: the new Chloe Benjamin, Under Story, out this month (I was an early evangelist for The Immortalists back when I worked at Penguin Random House). The new Ariel Lawhon, The Pirate Queen, came out this week, and I recommend her last one, The Frozen River, to just about everyone I know. And if you've read Station Eleven, or watched the show, Emily St. John Mandel has a new one too: Exit Party, which picks up with a character from her earlier novel after she gets out of prison.
We also get a new novel from John Green, Hollywood, Ending — his first adult novel in almost ten years — and Big Little Truths, the long-overdue follow-up to Big Little Lies, which finds those same five women a decade later, kids now in high school, secrets still secrets. Heart of Glass is another one I shelved recently, and I'm currently listening to The Calamity Club, Kathryn Stockett's first novel since The Help, which is just a joy.
I used to think a good fall reading list needed a theme. But Nora Ephron said it better than I could, years ago: "Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss."
Sending all of the cozy reading vibes your way.
Sweata Weatha and the Case for a Capsule Wardrobe
You should know: I am the complete opposite of a hoarder. The seasonal closet purge is one of my favorite pastimes, and fall is hands-down the best season to shop for. "Sweata weatha" is my Super Bowl, full stop.
But this year, I did things a little differently.
I love clothes — boots and sweaters, IYKYK — but I also have three kids, a business I run from my master bedroom, and about four minutes to get dressed each morning before someone needs a snack or a signature. As I've gone from pregnant to postpartum to IVF to pregnant to postpartum again, my style has drifted from boho chic to maternity to something closer to whatever's clean. Not exactly glamorous, but it holds up when you're running a company and shuttling two seven-year-olds to two different sports on the same Tuesday. It feels a little boring, though, and rediscovering my style has become a bit of a project.
That means getting 60% of what I never reach for out of my closet, and replacing it with outfits, not items: pieces that go together, that I can grab while half-asleep and still look like I have my life together (I don't, but I can look like I do).
I'm doing it on a budget, too, which means Gap barrel pants, Old Navy cardigans, and Aerie outerwear (hello, Labor Day sales!), with the occasional Madewell piece thrown in when I trade in old jeans for their $25 credit toward a new pair.
While I want to say this is about being a minimalist, the more honest reason is my ADHD: if my closet is disorganized, if there's stuff I never wear, I don't know what I have, and I’ll just throw on the same old things.
I've already spent too many years not recognizing my body through IVF, pregnancy, postpartum, and motherhood — my closet doesn't need to join that list.
Hashimoto’s Didn't Get the Progressive Overload Memo
The other day, I woke up, fed my three kids breakfast, took them to 9:45 mass, and then rushed the older two to a birthday party at a sports place. After being overstimulated by 30-plus kids for two hours, I came home and took a nap. That's pretty typical for me. I'm the energizer bunny... until I'm not.
The thing is, I actually love working out. But I recently came across a video from McCall McPherson that finally put words to something I've known for years: being active with Hashimoto's requires nuance. Progressive overload, the idea that you keep adding more weight, more reps, more intensity, is the default advice in every fitness app out there. And for most bodies, it works exactly like it's supposed to. For mine, it's a great way to feel amazing on Tuesday and flattened by Wednesday.
Hashimoto's is an autoimmune disease of the thyroid, and about 85% of the time, I don't think about it at all. But push too hard, and my body doesn't just get tired; it stages a full-on protest. Not soreness. Not the good kind of wrecked. More like crushing full-body fatigue that feels like first-trimester exhaustion, and then some.
There's a concept called spoon theory, where every task costs you a unit of energy, and once you're out, you're out, no matter how badly you want to keep going. I don't say it at dinner parties, but it's always in the back of my mind when I'm deciding whether today is a Pilates x Strength day or a "walk the dog around the block" day.
For me, what seems to work is a mix of Pilates and strength training, minus the heavy weights, with real rest days built in between. And walking, which somehow still doesn't feel like 'real' exercise even though it counts every single time.
I may never have a body like Hilary Duff, but at least I'll be able to take care of my kids without being on the brink of collapse, and that's a win.
Nobody Approved That Callaway Ad By Accident
By now you've probably seen it: the Good Good Golf x Callaway ad that opens with a man sprinting across a golf course to shove a woman to the ground because she touched his new driver. Not a metaphor. Not a "bit." A grown man slamming a woman into the turf, standing over her, telling her not to touch his stuff, while a golf company's logo sits in the corner.
I've worked in media for years now, and I know exactly how many hands an ad like that has to pass through before it goes live: writers, editors, brand managers, legal, whoever signs off on the final cut. Someone watched that footage and said yes — not once, but at multiple checkpoints where a no would've been easy (and, dare I say, obvious).
Callaway's CEO has since admitted the video was approved before it posted, calling it a mistake. But a shove that violent doesn't slip past that many eyes by accident. It gets through because somewhere along the way, someone decided it read as edgy, and never stopped to ask who's actually buying the clubs, the memberships, the merch. Spoiler alert: it's women.
According to the CDC, nearly one in four women in the U.S. will experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime. That's not rare; it's common enough that most rooms approving that ad probably had someone in them who'd lived it, and just didn't say so. Unless the room was entirely men, which, honestly, is also very possible.
Nobody in those rooms mistook it for fine. My bet is they assumed a woman hitting the ground would read as funny before it read as real — and that's pretty damn scary.
Ask Clara:
"How common is intimate partner violence?"
The Cosmo-Era Advice We Never Thought To Question
Raise your hand if you still think about "day to night" when it comes to picking outfits.
I mean, has that Cosmo-era advice ever even come in handy?
I recently came across this video of a woman who's been parting her hair "the opposite way" for over a decade because Seventeen magazine told her to, in an issue she probably read on her bedroom floor as a teenager. It got me thinking about every random tip 2000s-era magazines planted in our brains that we never once thought to question.
One commenter said she's been shaving her legs with conditioner for over twenty years because of something she read in Teen Vogue back in the day. Twenty years, from one stranger's tip in a magazine that no longer even exists.
I grew up on the same content — clips from Cosmo, Seventeen, and Glamour spread across my bedroom floor in Queens — and the nostalgia of it is genuinely funny to me. What isn't funny is remembering those same magazines telling us to count calories and fear carbs, right on the very next page. I think I speak for most millennial women when I say we didn't separate the two; we just believed all of it.
I've spent years unlearning the food part, but I'm not sure I ever unlearned the reflex underneath it: believing whatever's printed with enough confidence, no questions asked. Which feels a little terrifying now that "printed" has become "posted," and instead of three magazines a month, it's thousands of messages a day, from people whose only credential is that they seem confident on camera.
Twenty years is a long time to keep a hair part because one magazine said so, once, decades ago. It makes me wonder what we're believing right now, from someone with a ring light and zero medical degree, that we'll look back on in twenty years and say, "what the hell were we thinking?"
Am I the Only One Who's Constantly Running Out of Things?
Is it a universal girlhood experience to constantly be running out of things? Shampoo, moisturizer, magnesium supplements — you name it. Almost every day I'm thinking gotta order that, or digging through a cabinet looking for a backup that doesn't exist.
I like to consider myself a product-minimalist. I tout EltaMD's tinted SPF as my holy grail, and I have exactly one bronzer, one blush, one mascara, used until it's completely gone. I am not a nine-products-on-the-counter person, mostly because I've always been acne-prone, and if you know, you know how that story ends.
And yet I still run out of everything, always, at slightly different times, like the whole system's hanging on by a thread.
For a while, I assumed this was just what being an adult woman is: a thing I was supposed to have figured out by now, like everyone else apparently has. But honestly, I think it's an ADHD thing. If a product isn't directly in my line of sight, it doesn't exist to me. I'll walk past an empty shampoo bottle in the shower for four days straight before my brain connects "empty" with "I should order more," and it's been a week since I've seen wash day (which, no judgment if you've been there too).
What bothers me most isn't the running out. It's how wasteful it all feels — the last-minute Amazon order, the guilt of buying something in a panic instead of using up what I already have, the sense that a more organized version of me would've seen this coming.
I don't have a system. I've just accepted that I'll always be a little behind my own bathroom cabinet, buying what I need exactly when I need it, and never a day before.
If you've somehow cracked this, genuinely, tell me. I'll take any tips.
Can We Stop Looking at ADHD as a Weakness?
You know what I haven't been doing lately? Blaming things on my ADHD.
Not because it went anywhere. I was diagnosed in my mid-30s, the same year I finally understood why I was always losing my car keys, starting four businesses in my head while making coffee, and never once managing one thing at a time. What changed is I stopped treating it as the explanation for everything that goes wrong, and started noticing when it's responsible for things going right.
That reframe got a boost this week when my mom sent me a video of Mike Repole (Queens guy, my people) talking about how much of his career he credits to the way his brain works. Coming from a guy who sold two beverage companies to Coca-Cola for $9.7 billion, that's not nothing.
I feel it, too. Rescripted is my greatest hyperfixation, and my ability to take risks, pivot quickly, and hold six ideas at once instead of picking one is exactly why it works — even when my process doesn't look like anything you'd find in a business book. It shouldn't have taken me until 37 to believe that about myself.
For years I apologized for the parts of my brain that move too fast, never once realizing those were the same parts building the business, the ones that jump into someone's story at girl dinner before they've finished it and somehow still get the table laughing.
So yes, actually, I do think ADHD is a superpower, just not the TikTok-caption kind. It's the kind that comes with real cost, real chaos, and days you can't get out of your own way — but also real creativity and the kind of momentum most people spend years trying to manufacture.
I just spent thirty-some-odd years only loving myself enough to admit to the first part.
What the Lindsay Clancy Trial Unlocked in Millennial Moms
If you're anything like me, you can't stop scrolling #lindsayclancy — not just for the trial itself, but for what's underneath it: thousands of women saying some version of "I had those thoughts too." Postpartum nurses describing how broken the follow-up system actually is. Moms naming the exact intrusive thought they had, years later, like it's still haunting them (because it probably is).
That's the part nobody predicted: a murder trial is not where you'd expect an entire generation of mothers to finally say the quiet part out loud, but here we are.
Maybe it's because the numbers finally have a face. The CDC puts postpartum depression at about one in eight new moms, and a recent study found barely one in ten get any formal screening, despite ACOG's guidelines. Postpartum psychosis is rarer, closer to one in a thousand, but in this case, it became the whole story.
The thing is, if you've been in it, you know the line between a thought and an impulse can get murky real fast — which is probably why this trial ignited something in millennial moms. How many of us have our own hindsight-is-20/20 moment, the appointment where we said the thing and watched it get filed as nothing? Or never said anything at all, because admitting to it could mean losing our kids, our credibility, our whole identity as someone safe.
A lot of us have been there; the scary part is that only one of us made the news.