8 Things Only Your Cool Aunt Will Tell You

I didn't have a cool aunt growing up. I wish I had, because for most of my young adult life I was pretty much ass over teakettle. Had there been a woman with a few notches in her stilettos to tell me about the stuff my parents were either too prudish to get into (leave when the threesome becomes a twosome) or not hip enough to know (a hat gives you instant personality), I might have avoided learning a few lessons the hard way.

Now that I’m mid-30s-adjacent, I still don’t entirely know what I’m doing, to be honest; but I have lived, I have loved, and I have learned. And, in doing so, I’ve become a consigliera of sorts, the kind of trusted advisor who’s going to tell you what’s really up — straight, no chaser. Being a woman-in-training has never been easy, so my hope is that the hard earned nuggets to follow will help you answer questions you didn’t even know to ask, to not take it all so seriously, and to avoid the kind of public embarrassments and private disasters that, while character building, leave you with no options in life other than comedy or writing, or worse, a combination of the two.