Dear Alison Mutha, I don’t know who you are, but you have written the thing I have been swallowing for fifty years. Enclosed is a check for $200. Print another one. Tell the truth again.
Martha didn't throw the magazines away. She drove them to her book club. mutha magazine alison mutha magazine
Alison received the letter on a Monday, just as her landlord was threatening eviction. She stared at the check. Then at the magazine. Then at her own two kids, who were currently using a tube of lipstick to draw a mural on the wall. Dear Alison Mutha, I don’t know who you
The book club was composed of six women between the ages of 68 and 82. They passed the copies around like contraband. By Friday, Martha had written Alison a letter, handwritten in looping cursive: Tell the truth again
The name was stamped in bruised-plum ink on the recycled cardstock cover. Below it, in smaller type: A Magazine for the Rest of Us.
The last page of every issue was a photo of a reader’s real-life mess: a sink full of dishes, a toddler crying in a shopping cart, a mother crying in a parked car. The caption was always the same.