Catherine Gigante-Brown

Being a little bit chubby is better than being a lot dead.

Candida Royalle pretty much invented couples erotica. She made it socially-acceptable. Respectable. The women in her films looked like real women and had real, comfortable female bodies. And her movies actually had stories. Good stories. She hired her friends—adult legends like Annie Sprinkle, Veronicas Hart and Vera, and Gloria Leonard — to create Femme films too.

"Sometimes David wore his hair spiked like a cockscomb. Others, he wore it feathery like a baby chick. He wore his Mohawk to summer camp (exchanging encouraging head chucks with another older camper who sported one, too) and even to Vacation Bible School—no judgment there."

I’m sure you’ll find it a delicious and well-stocked place. There are just a few rules

erotic. intimate. unapologetic.

Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions wasn't your typical cutesie baby fare. It was raw, real—and unabashedly funny.

I was 21 –– a Catholic, heterosexual college student, living at home in Brooklyn and still trying to discover who I was. At the crossroads of her life, Lorde knew exactly who she was. She was waging a war against cancer and sharing an old house in Staten Island with her kids and partner. But maybe we weren’t so different after all.

As a breast cancer survivor, the worst day of the year is when I go for my mammogram. True, nobody actually likes mammos, but I’ve been bitten by one. On the way to my annual squishing, I realized that I have a bunch of coping strategies.

I’m boycotting you until you start recognizing breast cancer survivors like me by carrying mastectomy bras.

After I got over the initial devastation, I pulled myself up by my big-girl panties and got on with it. Chemo was no picnic—but it was do-able.