(View entire post here)

[Editor's Note: Amanda Stern is the author of "Scout's Honor," which appears in Love Is a Four-Letter Word]

I was the type of teenager who, in a fairly successful bid, acted tough to thwart my deep-seated fear of - well, most everything.  Part of acting tough included big talk. As a big talking teenager, I exaggerated my experiences in less successful attempts to thwart participation in the very activities I claimed advanced expertise. To be clear: I was a bit of a liar.  In "I Never," the popular drinking game where one drinks only IF they're guilty of the dirty truism I was consistently drinking. According to past games, by the time I was 15 I'd: had sex on a gynecologist's table, done acid, made out with a girl, spent the night on a park bench in Washington Square Park, been chased down the street by a knife-wielding mugger and had sex with two brothers. I'd done none of those things, but pretending brought me an immense amount of street-cred with my naïve 9^th grade colleagues. 

(View entire post here)

[Editor's Note: Dan Kennedy is the author of "Exactly Like Liz Phair, Except Older. And with Hypochondria ," which appears in Love Is a Four-Letter Word]

This ex-girlfriend of mine was at this book reading I was doing downtown, and out of nowhere this baby walks up; totally surprises us. The tiny infant looked exactly like one of The Supremes in their 60's heyday on Motown Records; maybe six-months old, but it had huge adult-sized teeth. And this baby liked me way too much; crawled fast and robotically up onto the table I was sitting behind, her head swaying to some sweet jam she was belting out, teeth the size of her own hand glistening in a disturbing confident smile. The ex-girlfriend, she's taken to attending my readings, and each night when she approaches me to have her book signed, something odd like this happens. And then she suggests we leave the bookstore together and go watch the Disney film Bed Knobs and Broomsticks. The catch, she says, is that if I accept the invitation, I will die. I am tempted because I love this movie, and determined to figure out a way around the death part, but in the end I decide against it; I decide I would rather live.

(View entire post here)

[Editor's Note: Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of "Trans," which appears in Love Is a Four-Letter Word]

Nine years ago, I made a big stack of all the clothes I had ever worn and gave them to the homeless.  This included wingtip shoes, three-piece suits, Grateful Dead T-shirts, ties, belts, cotton shirts and boxer shorts.  Pffft, down the chute.  A moment like this is one of the rites of passage for transsexuals in transition, or can be.  It was for me. 

And yet it was not without a bittersweet pang that I hauled the bags of clothing down to Goodwill.  What I realized was that I was saying farewell not only to the Perry Ellis suit and the Timberland jacket, but to the man I had been when I had worn them.  In some twisted way, I was breaking up with myself.

Fifteen years earlier, I'd broken up with Allison (an account of which appears in Love is a Four Letter Word). I was glad to be done with the endless bickering, (like the night after my friend Tim died, and she said, "I'm glad he's dead!  He was so annoying!")  On the other hand, Allison was the person I'd been closest to when my father died, when I lost my first job, when I got my first short story published. 

(View entire post here)

It was 1977 and I was on my first date.   It wasn't night, actually, but late afternoon, unremittingly frigid and dreary as only Chicago winter Saturdays can be.   I was eleven.  The boy's name was Toby, and he was also eleven, in my sixth-grade class at school.   He liked Abba.   I liked Rod Stewart.   When the weather was warm we biked over to each other's houses and listened to each other's records.   Sometimes we toted along our pet guinea pigs in our bike baskets so they could visit each other.   My guinea pig had short, sleek black hair and was named Streaker.  Toby's guinea pig, whose name I don't remember, was an exotic long-haired Peruvian and resembled a mop.

We'd met the year before, in fifth grade.   He ran up behind me on the playground while I was talking to my friends and kicked my butt as hard as he could, then ran off laughing.   We all knew what that meant.  He was a cute kid, skinny and freckled, with shiny white-blond hair in a classic '70s bowl cut and an incongruously deep, husky voice that stayed pretty much the same even after it officially changed a few years later.   I was also skinny and freckled, but my hair was long and almost black.  I wondered what it felt like to have blonde hair.  Did you feel being blonde inside yourself?   Maybe Toby wondered the same/opposite about me.

(View entire post here)

(View entire post here)

It was a mistake to have accepted Amy's invitation. We had been broken up for two years and the last thing I wanted was to rekindle any part of our relationship. But I feared that declining could somehow be misconstrued as me still being fearfully, immaturely, trapped in the past, unable to move forward and "just be friends," proof no doubt that I harbored feelings for her and lamented my decision to end the relationship.

So I said, "Yes, Amy, that sounds great. I'd love to see the performance with you."

The performance was by Zingaro, a French dance company who famously incorporated live horses into their act, and it was staged, for lack of an adequate venue, under a giant big top tent in Battery Park. It was all the rage in New York City. And it was also very expensive. So my motives in accepting were duplicitous.

(View entire post here)

1. You really haven't lived until you've seen a college English class analyze your love life.  The students, in my case, were discussing scenes from a book I'd written, a memoir about growing up fat and dealing with issues of body image, family, and relationships.  A grad student acquaintance had chosen to assign it to her introductory lit course and she invited me to visit the class weblog and observe the discussion for a week.  On the last day, she said, I could respond and answer questions.

I tingled to think about it. A lit class! Maybe they would talk about how I explored the shifting nature of identity or my subtle critique of diet culture. Or maybe they'd discover some other brilliant theme that my subconscious genius had woven into the rich tapestry of narrative!  Instead they picked apart my choice of boyfriends.  One day I checked the blog and found, to my horror, that they'd really gone to town on the breakup scene in chapter 34.

"Jeez, I saw it coming," one girl said. "Why didn't she?"

"She's really in denial," another one wrote. "She should have dropped him like a bad habit."

(View entire post here)

(View entire post here)

Michael Taeckens, editor of Love Is a Four-Letter Word, has put together a schedule of different writers from the book for the week of July 27th If you have any questions for any of the authors, add a comment to any of their posts.

Here is more information on Love Is a Four-Letter Word:

From Junot Díaz, Lynda Barry, Gary Shteyngart, and Kate Christensen to popular up-and-comers like Dan Kennedy, Wendy McClure, and Brock Clarke, Love Is a Four-Letter Word is a dead-on contemporary collection of true stories of seduction, heartbreak, and regret. Fearlessly revealing their shattered hearts and crushed egos; their indiscretions and indignities; their delusions, desperation, and disappointments, these talented writers capture the dark side of love in prose ranging from comic to poetic, poignant to cringe-inducing. Also featuring three cartoon/ graphic essays as a sixteen-page color insert, this anthology is perfect for anyone who's ever loved and lost.

This week's bloggers:

Monday - D. E. Rasso
Tuesday - Wendy McClure
Wednesday - Said Sayrafiezadeh
Thursday - Said Sayrafiezadeh
Friday - Maud Newton