What is Crone Sandwich?
Crone Sandwich is a newsletter about the 50-something stuff: menopause, semi-grown kids, aging parents, empty-nesting, food, colonoscopies, vaginal estrogen, fun stuff, weed, sex, friendship, writing, insomnia, occasional crafts, dinner, books, rage, grief, autoimmune illness, mindful drinking, holidays, marriage—alllll the stuff—by the author of (among other books) Waiting for Birdy, How to Be a Person, What Can I Say? We All Want Impossible Things, and the forthcoming Sandwich (June 2024). You can learn more about me and my writing at my website.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter. I don’t think there will be content you don’t have access to if you don’t pay to subscribe? So please consider buying a paid subscription only if it’s not a burden to you and if you care AT ALL that Birdy still has one and a half years of college left, ha ha ha ha ho hee herg kill me. If it were a normal thing to do, I would be like, “We have x amount of income. If you have more than that, please consider a paid subscription.” But I can feel that it’s too abnormal to start off that way! If you do pay to subscribe, please know how incredibly grateful I’ll be—I understand that there are lots of demands on your resources. I promise I do.
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Substack says, “You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.” Yes! Plus, you never know when there might be random cat content! Ha ha ha! Or some other weird shit—who knows? I like the idea that this is both a public space and a semi-private one. Like, my parents aren’t likely to fully stumble onto it? But also nor is anybody hiring me and then looking over my shoulder to scold me for being too VOICEY. Which is LITERALLY a thing I have been editorially scolded for being! It makes me feel like I’m in the kind of Ovid myth, where I’ll lose my voice but at the exact moment that happens, the editor who scolded me will turn into an elm tree with, like, an eternally limp dick made of bark. Hi! Are you still glad you’re here? Good.
Who am I?
God. I don’t even know anymore. I’m a 55-year-old white half-Jewish cis queer menopausal woman. I am married to the luscious and infuriating Michael, who I’ve been with since we were 20. Our kids, Ben and Birdy, are 24 and 20. I wrote a blog on Babycenter back when I was expecting Birdy—back before the word blog even existed!—which turned into a memoir, Waiting for Birdy, and I wrote another parenting memoir called Catastrophic Happiness. I wrote another blog for a long time, which was about food and parenting. Until last year, I was the Real Simple etiquette columnist for 10 (!) years. I have written books: the kids’ skill-building books How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?; the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night; the kids’ craft book Stitch Camp, which I co-wrote with my friend Nicole; and the novels We All Want Impossible Things, which came out last year, and Sandwich, which comes out in June of 2024. I’ve contributed regularly to the New York Times, Real Simple, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and lots other publications. I live in my empty nest (sob!) in Amherst, Massachusetts with Michael and our cats, Snapper and Jellyfish.
You can also find me on instagram or at my website.
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