Michelle Orange

Biography

Michelle Orange is a contributing editor to VQR and the author of This is Running for Your Life: Essays (FSG, 2013). Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, the Nation, the New York Times, Bookforum, Film Comment, Slate, and other publications. Her next book, Pure Flame, is forthcoming (FSG, 2021).

See Work

CRITICISM / Spring 2021

Self-Portrait of an Artist

By Michelle Orange
CRITICISM / Fall 2020

The Real Real

By Michelle Orange

Are there still documentaries? A glance at this year’s Oscar nominees, a thriving festival circuit, and my own Netflix history makes the answer plain. And yet the question persists. It squats at the end of long days spent consuming “real”...
CRITICISM / Summer 2020

The Art of Watching

By Michelle Orange

Early in January, a few days into the New Year, I sat with four students on the ninth floor of a Twenty-Third Street Manhattan building. I have two dominant memories of our week together: The first is of the forbearance with which they...
CRITICISM / Winter 2019

Working It Out

By Michelle Orange

A later episode of the debut Showtime series Couples Therapy features a wedding montage. Harvested from personal archives, the footage depicts real-life couples in their respective matrimonial costumes. They smile and preen for the camera...
CRITICISM / Summer 2019

How Free Is Too Free?

By Michelle Orange

After a fallow period of about fifteen years, in 2014 I returned to driving. Having let my license expire out of pure indolence, I embarked on a process that ended with a road test in deepest Brooklyn. I had no car and no plans to buy one...
CRITICISM / Spring 2019

On Death and Decluttering

By Michelle Orange

 Two women share a hospital room, separated by a green-blue curtain, at the end of a brief, beige hallway. Their prospects foreclosed by illness, the women have agreed to enter this room, if not to share it, and to find what peace is...
CRITICISM / Fall 2018

Cruelty With a Point

By Michelle Orange

In life and in depictions of life, when is it better to look directly at instances of suffering, and when to turn away? When is looking a form of violation, and when is it a moral imperative? As the documentary image proliferates, so, too...
CRITICISM / Spring 2018

The Journalist and the Masturbator

By Michelle Orange

Autumn stalled, the heat lingered, and an interim season began. In lieu of leaves, the sky rained with tales of sexual predation. More curiously, the world took notice: On the ground there occurred a clamor for stories of harassment and...
CRITICISM / Summer 2017

Screening the World

By Michelle Orange

Television may be remembered, among other things, as having entered a “golden age” even as it ceased to exist. As a term, television feels increasingly inapt, vestigial, at risk of acquiring the air quotes that presage irrelevance. Still...

CRITICISM / Spring 2017

Professional Lives

By Michelle Orange

“Career woman” is a term that enjoyed a certain vogue across the latter half of the twentieth century. An American idiom much bound to the eighties but coined in the thirties, under the guise of defining what a woman is, the phrase points...