Mia Siitonen

  • Girlfriends, friendship and the coming of age story

    Girlfriends, friendship and the coming of age story

    Before Lena Dunham and Greta Gerwig, there was Claudia Weill, whose 1978 debut feature film, Girlfriends, inspired the work of countless filmmakers and their seminal coming of age works; from Dunham’s Girls to Gerwig’s Frances Ha and Ladybird. Telling the story of best friends and flatmates Anne and Susan as they navigate their twenties in New York, Girlfriends unabashedly affords its protagonists’… Read more

  • On Being Ill, Hot Milk, memory and love

    On Being Ill, Hot Milk, memory and love

    But sympathy we cannot have. Wisest Fate says no. If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise (…) one great sigh alone would rise to Heaven, and the only attitudes for men… Read more

  • Heartburn, and the role of food in literature

    Heartburn, and the role of food in literature

    “When I’m reading,” a friend admitted to me once, “I just always wonder what the characters are eating”. It makes sense: in so much of the literature we read, what and how the characters eat – if they cook, if they share meals with friends – is omitted. I think it’s a great shame. Even… Read more