Author Profile
Is your relationship with your vagina complicated by past trauma or unmet expectations? (yep.) It might be time for a course called Viva la Vagina!
She’s made all the mistakes, so you don’t have to… Ask Erin is a weekly advice column, in which Erin answers your burning questions about anything at all.
Q.
Hello Erin,
My partner and I of seven years had a trial run of an open relationship, so to speak. I slept with one person during that time, and I asked them before sleeping with them if they had tested themselves for STIs and HIV. They said they did, and the results were negative. We slept together once. Six months later, I went in for a random STD test, and it turns out I have chlamydia.
Eventually, I had to admit that the past I wanted to have — the mother I wished for so desperately — didn’t exist. I am re-parenting myself as I parent.
It was a pleasure to chat with Katherine Forbes Riley about her debut novel, The Bobcat.
About the book: With the hypnotic intensity of Emily Fridlund’s The History of Wolves comes a mesmerizing love story in lush, gorgeous prose that examines art, science, nature, and the magic of human chemistry. Laurelie is an art student who has retreated deep into her imagination in the aftermath of a sexual assault. One day in the woods, she and the child she babysits encounter an injured pregnant bobcat and the reclusive hiker who has been following it for hundreds of miles. Together in the wilderness, they construct their own kind of separate peace. Then the child goes missing, forcing them all apart, and each must find a way to reenter the world alone.
