Author: Amanda Judson

  • Forty Years Out

    Forty Years Out

    On leaving in 1985, the revolving door, and the friendships that survive it. There is a kind of party I have been to more times than I can count. Paper plates, a cake from the good bakery, somebody’s husband in charge of the music. The guest of honor is leaving. Back to Washington, Manchester, or…

  • Arrivederci, Common Sense

    Arrivederci, Common Sense

    The website had promised wind in your hair. Sara had interpreted this loosely, given that she’d be wearing a helmet, but she’d allowed herself the fantasy anyway: sun-warmed roads, the glitter of the Mediterranean, and herself looking effortlessly continental, like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, gamine and windswept. People back home would be unbearable about…

  • The Sea Is Always Impossibly Blue

    The Sea Is Always Impossibly Blue

    On Greece, the influencer economy, and the quiet violence of the ‘undiscovered’. There is a taverna on Corfu — or there was; I can’t be sure it still exists — where the paper tablecloths were weighted down with a single candle in a Nescafé jar. The owner’s mother brought food without asking what you wanted.…