Design by Cassie Skoras
In the winter of 2009, I made a list. I grabbed a piece of scrap paper from my parents’ kitchen desk and wrote down every single Meryl Streep movie that existed on the internet. Every weekend, I shut myself in my bedroom to reach beyond what I viewed as a limiting Midwestern upbringing.
I started with
The Bridges of Madison County, the movie that first drew me to Meryl years earlier. She plays Francesca, an Italian woman who moves to America after World War II to marry an Iowan farmer. The character reminded me of my grandmother Marjorie she left her lush, coastal home in British Columbia to settle with my grandfather in Missouri, where she raised three kids, cooked all the meals, baked all the treats, worked as a nurse, and sewed costumes for the local theater. After she turned 70 and her dementia worsened, she would reach for the phone book to call her mother, who’d been dead for decades. She’d ask me, then a pre-teen, if she could go down to the