Previously in this series.

You are poor, bright, and beautiful, but you never feel quite bright or beautiful enough because your best friend is brighter and beautifuller.

Your best friend has never forgiven you for being the first to experience menarche or being allowed to progress beyond primary school. Ever since, she’s been competing with you over just about everything.

You feel an unnameable, shameful aversion to your mother, whose limping gait you are afraid you will come to adopt.

Naples is trash, and you grow up to realise that you live amongst trash.

...Read More

Previously in this series.

As a child, you found yourself in a near constant state of existential threat, often caused by your parents’ party guests or abnormal creatures you met on bicycle rides.

One day, when you are sitting down to tea, you are surprised to read in the paper that a once-thought-to-be-dead great aunt has caused a scandal in the capital city of a small European country you can’t quite place on the map.

Your fondest family memories involve the moors, and the faintest sense of dread.

As a teenager, your sister showed great promise as a ballerina. She went off to study under the greats, and you never heard from her again. You occasionally see posters for her performances, which appear to be growing darker and darker each season.

The most prominent pieces of furniture in your home are a fainting couch and a large vase of half dead ferns.

...Read More

Previously in this series

You are a man: a worthy warrior, a hard-hearted hero, a mighty mail-warrior, a sturdy spear-bearer, a resolute retainer, an eager earl, a fierce-minded fighter, a stalwart soldier…

You deliver both insults and speeches exclusively in tight alliterative verse.

You are a pagan, and this is very sad.

You are a Christian, but in a suitably Germanic way.

You are the last survivor of your people.

No one understands your suffering.

You bury gold with your dear ones. You cover your people with earth. You conceal treasure under the ground.

Your favorite sport is ill-advised wrestling.

You drink mead from a mead-cup while sitting on a mead-bench in a mead-hall at a mead-party.

...Read More

Previously in this series. 

You are a woman of modest means, yet you only seem to date men who own hotels.

You are a nice girl who knows exactly one nice guy. You forget about him a lot, but gosh, he sure is nice. Whoever he is.

You spend roughly 35% of your day sitting in fashionable cafés having very intense conversations.

You own like three Samsung Galaxy S6s and so do all your friends.

So you met your soul mate at age ten, who doesn’t?

You have a dark, shameful family secret that must be kept at any cost. Excuse me, did we say “have”? We meant had.

Once again you are being forced to choose between your stake in the empire your family has painstakingly built at great cost and sacrifice, or the person you truly love.

Your past always comes back to haunt you. Also, maybe, a ghost.

...Read More