Politics March 19, 2010

It astonished me to learn that Emily Gould has a thing for tattoos. On page 169 of her 208-page memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever, she tells us that she “started getting tattooed,” a verb tense that implies she’ll continue to add to what sounds like an exotic if thematically disjointed exhibit: koi, a chrysanthemum, poppies, two starfish. And on her hip, a broken heart—it was her first: “When it was my turn I barely winced, and soon I had a permanent broken heart. It was emboldening in general to know that I could act nonchalant about pain.”