Books
20th edition of Emily Post’s ‘Etiquette’ offers updated advice on pronouns and much more
A guide for daily life ‘with all its successes and mishaps’
Some families manage bakeries, nurseries, or vineyards.
For Daniel Post Senning, great-great grandson of Emily Post and an Emily Post Institute co-president, and Lizzie Post, great-great granddaughter of Emily Post and an Emily Post Institute co-president, etiquette is the family business.
The Emily Post Institute, based in Waterbury, Vt., conducts seminars and trainings. It partners with businesses and nonprofit groups to “bring etiquette and manners to a wide audience,” according to its website.
When you think of etiquette, you’re likely to be transported to Downton Abbey. Butlers, finger bowls, the dancing school lessons you hated as a kid – stuffy, rich (usually white, hetero) people at formal dinners managing a zillion salad forks – come to mind.
But, for Post and Senning, who co-host the popular, entertaining podcast “Awesome Etiquette,” etiquette is as far from being an ossified, exclusionary code of manners as we are from being the Dowager having tea at Downton.
Emily Post, the acclaimed etiquette maven, published her first book on etiquette, “Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home,” in 1922.
Post’s seminal book, considered by many to be the “holy writ” of etiquette (and stolen from libraries almost as frequently as the Bible), has been revised by Post herself and her descendants during the past century to evolve with changing times.
“Emily Post’s Etiquette, The Centennial Edition” by Lizzie Post and Daniel Post Senning, the 20th edition of Emily Post’s “Etiquette,” is just out. (For info on “Emily Post’s Etiquette, the Centennial Edition,” the Awesome Etiquette podcast and the Emily Post Institute, visit emilypost.com.)
The “Centennial Edition” has lively, up-to-date advice and discussion on everything in life in the early 2020s from the use of “mx” as a title to grief to respecting people’s pronouns to how to get company to stop making bigoted “jokes” to how to handle an inebriated guest.
From the get-go, Emily Post, who was born in Baltimore in 1872 during the Gilded Age and died in 1960, didn’t view etiquette as restrictive or exclusionary. “As Emily explained,’” Post and Senning write, “etiquette is not some rigid code of manners; it’s simply how persons’ lives touch one another.”
If you browse some editions of Emily Post’s books (as this reporter has), you won’t find schoolmarmish directives or ethereal descriptions of the etiquette gods’ mannered lives on Mount Olympus.
You’ll find daily life “with all its successes and mishaps,” Post and Senning write, “With tales like ‘How a Dinner Can Be Bungled’ and characters such as Mrs. Worldly, Constance Style, Mrs. Kindhart and the Onceweres.”
Emily Post painted relatable pictures of what to do and not to do, Post and Senning write.
Though Emily Post wouldn’t have known what a smartphone or social media were, her etiquette “still aims to equip you,” write Post and Senning, “with a sense of confidence and preparedness for some of the situations you’ll encounter at home, at work, in your social life, and when you’re out and about.”
Despite claims that etiquette is dead, it is very much alive, say Post and Senning.
Steven Petrow, an award-winning journalist and expert on civility and manners, agrees. “I’m always surprised by how timely Emily Post’s advice continues to be,” Petrow, who is gay, said in an email to the Blade. “Recently, I wrote about ‘monkeypox manners,’ and cited Mrs. Post’s timeless advice about respect, consideration and honesty in our social interactions, which includes those in the bedroom.”
Post and Senning graciously took time out from their busy schedules (the launch of the “Centennial Edition,” hosting their podcast – along with their other work with the Emily Post Institute) to talk with the Blade over the phone in separate interviews.
“Emily Post’s Etiquette, The Centennial Edition” was a Herculean labor of writing and editing for Post and Senning. It took a year to write the book, Post said. And, then there was all of the time spent to ensure that the book was carefully edited.
“I would write,” said Post, 40, who manages the Institute’s publishing efforts, “Dan would come in and help me edit the book.”
It was intense, “day-to-day” labor for her and Senning (along with their other work), Post said. “I’m grateful to all the people who were willing to have their lives disrupted while we worked on it,” she added.
Etiquette has been used for less than gracious purposes, Post said. “It can easily be exclusive.”
The Post family believes that etiquette is based on the principles of consideration, respect and honesty. This may sound abstract. But these principles aren’t empty words. They have a profound impact in the real world.
Before joining the Emily Post Institute in 2008 when he was 30, Senning worked in the performing arts, touring with the Laurie Cameron Company in Los Angeles.
Today, Senning, who lives in Duxbury, Vt., with his wife, Puja and their three children Anisha, Arya, and William, manages the Institute’s training programs. He has co-authored several books on etiquette covering topics from business to digital manners and regularly speaks with media outlets about business, technology, and dining etiquette.
In 2009, same-sex marriage became legal in Vermont. “Then, before the Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling,” he said, “we were in the vanguard. We got questions about how to respond to same-sex weddings,” Senning added.
The Institute’s response was to note how normal civil unions were, Senning said, and that same-sex weddings weren’t different from hetero weddings.
“If you’re invited to a civil union, reply,” Senning recalled the Institute advising, “let people know if you can or can’t attend.”
Senning loved the “normalization” of the response. “It was really affirming to me,” he said.
Etiquette isn’t only for happy times. It’s called on when things get rough.
“Etiquette has a role in hard times,” Post, who’s been an American Express spokesperson and written columns for publications ranging from “Broccoli Magazine” to “Women’s Running,” said.
Many go through hard times from losing a job to being ill to grieving, she added. Emily Post may have written on etiquette a century ago, but her thoughts on grief ring as true on an iPad screen as they did then in a hardback book.
“At no time does solemnity so possess our souls as when we stand deserted at the brink of darkness into which our loved one has gone,” Emily Post wrote in 1922, “And the last place in the world where we would look for comfort at such a time is in the seeming artificiality of etiquette; yet it is in the moment of deepest sorrow that etiquette performs its most vital and real service.”
“All set rules for social observance have for their object the smoothing of personal contracts,” Emily Post added, “and in nothing is smoothness so necessary as in observing the solemn rites accorded our dead.”
Etiquette can help people grieve together in community through writing a condolence note, attending a funeral or another act of common grief, Lizzie Post said.
If you’ve suffered a loss, it can be incredible to realize the impact a loved one has had when you receive condolence notes or see so many people at a memorial service.
There’s a new trend where you can take part in the grief without going to a funeral, Post, who lives in her native state of Vermont, said. “When someone dies, for example, you raise a glass at five o’clock to honor them.”
Sometimes you have to use etiquette to stand against prejudice. If someone’s telling a racist or anti-queer joke at your dinner table, you’ll need to say, “‘I’m sorry. This is not a joke for this table,’” Post said.
While etiquette counsels against rudeness, safety trumps etiquette, Post and Senning have said on the Awesome Etiquette podcast and in the “Centennial Edition.”
Tolerance doesn’t mean tolerating an unwanted hug, an inappropriate touch or being “othered,” said Post, who has co-authored and authored etiquette books on topics ranging from weddings to legalized cannabis use.
Take hugging. “We talk about how to ask for a hug and how to block a hug,” Post said.
Etiquette experts, like the rest of us, take time off. On vacation, Post, co-author and narrator with Kelly Williams Brown of the Audible Original “Mistakes were Made” (think etiquette meets “Broad City”), doesn’t want to be rude to people. “But, sometimes, I don’t want to analyze behavior,” she said, “I just want to act.”
For info on the fascinating life of Emily Post, go to “Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners” by Laura Claridge.
Books
I’m a lesbian and LGBTQ books would have changed my life
Misguided parents pushing Montgomery County court case
As a child born in Maryland in the 80’s, I had very few LGBTQ+ role models other than Elton John and Ellen DeGeneres. In high school, I went through the motions of going out on Friday nights with boyfriends and dancing with them at prom, but I felt nothing. I desperately wanted to fit in, and it took me until my senior year of high school to finally admit to myself that I was different – and that it hurt too much to hide it anymore.
When I think back on those years, I feel the heartache and pain all over again. I used to lay awake at night begging God not to make me gay. When a boy on my Cross Country team accused me and my friends of being lesbians, I scoffed and said, “You wish.” I hid my true self in cheap wine coolers while my hate for myself festered.
I found healing in books, my creative writing class, and my school’s literary magazine. Writing allowed me to hold up a mirror to myself and see that I could be many things: a loving daughter and sister, a supportive friend, a dedicated member of the Cross Country team, and also a girl who wanted a girlfriend. In my love poems, I evolved from ambiguous pronouns to distinctly feminine ones. When I felt ready to tell my best friend, I showed her one of my poems. To my surprise, the world did not end. She smiled and said, “It’s a good poem. Are you ready to go to the mall?”
I’m one of the lucky ones. When I finally did come out to my parents, they told me they would always love me and want me to be happy. That’s not the case for more than 40% of LGBTQ+ youth, who are kicked out of their homes after they find the courage to tell their family who they truly are. We are facing a mental health epidemic among LGBTQ+ youth, with 41% seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, the vast majority living in homes that aren’t accepting.
Some of the dissenting parents in Mahmoud vs. Taylor argue that inclusive books aren’t appropriate for elementary school kids. To clarify, these books are simply available in schools – they aren’t required reading for anyone. There is nothing sexual or provocative about stories like “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” or “Jacob’s Room to Choose” that send a very simple, non-political message: We all are different, and we all deserve to be treated with respect. Opting out of books that show diversity, out of fear that it might “make kids gay” fails to recognize a fundamental truth: art, pop culture, even vegan food cannot make someone gay. I was born this way. There were times I wished that I wasn’t, and that was because I didn’t have books like these telling me it was OK to be who I am.
I wonder how many parents opting out of these books will end up having a LGBTQ+ child. It is both horrible and true that these parents have two choices: love and accept your LGBTQ+ child, or risk losing them. Now that I’m a parent myself, I feel more than ever that our one aim in parenthood is to love our kids for exactly who they are, not who we want them to be.
For several years, a grocery store in Silver Spring, Md., displayed a poem I wrote for my mother in my school’s literary magazine. I wrote about how she taught me that red and blue popples can play together, and that Barbie doesn’t need Ken to be happy. I imagine that maybe, a girl passing through the store read that poem and saw a glimpse of herself inside. That spark of recognition – of I’m not the only one – is all I wanted as a child. I was able to find my happiness and my community, and I want every LGBTQ+ child to be able to do the same.
Joanna Hoffman was born and raised in Silver Spring, Md. She is the author of the poetry collection ‘Running for Trap Doors’ (Sibling Rivalry Press) and is the communications director for LPAC, the nation’s only organization dedicated to advancing the political representation of LGBTQ+ women and nonbinary candidates.
Books
A boy-meets-boy, family-mess story with heat
New book offers a stunning, satisfying love story
‘When the Harvest Comes’
By Denne Michele Norris
c.2025, Random House
$28/304 pages
Happy is the bride the sun shines on.
Of all the clichés that exist about weddings, that’s the one that seems to make you smile the most. Just invoking good weather and bright sunshine feels like a cosmic blessing on the newlyweds and their future. It’s a happy omen for bride and groom or, as in the new book “When the Harvest Comes” by Denne Michele Norris, for groom and groom.
Davis Freeman never thought he could love or be loved like this.
He was wildly, wholeheartedly, mind-and-soul smitten with Everett Caldwell, and life was everything that Davis ever wanted. He was a successful symphony musician in New York. They had an apartment they enjoyed and friends they cherished. Now it was their wedding day, a day Davis had planned with the man he adored, the details almost down to the stitches in their attire. He’d even purchased a gorgeous wedding gown that he’d never risk wearing.
He knew that Everett’s family loved him a lot, but Davis didn’t dare tickle the fates with a white dress on their big day. Everett’s dad, just like Davis’s own father, had considerable reservations about his son marrying another man – although Everett’s father seemed to have come to terms with his son’s bisexuality. Davis’s father, whom Davis called the Reverend, never would. Years ago, father and son had a falling-out that destroyed any chance of peace between Davis and his dad; in fact, the door slammed shut to any reconciliation.
But Davis tried not to think about that. Not on his wedding day. Not, unbeknownst to him, as the Reverend was rushing toward the wedding venue, uninvited but not unrepentant. Not when there was an accident and the Reverend was killed, miles away and during the nuptials.
Davis didn’t know that, of course, as he was marrying the love of his life. Neither did Everett, who had familial problems of his own, including homophobic family members who tried (but failed) to pretend otherwise.
Happy is the groom the sun shines on. But when the storm comes, it can be impossible to remain sunny.
What can be said about “When the Harvest Comes?” It’s a romance with a bit of ghost-pepper-like heat that’s not there for the mere sake of titillation. It’s filled with drama, intrigue, hate, characters you want to just slap, and some in bad need of a hug.
In short, this book is quite stunning.
Author Denne Michele Norris offers a love story that’s everything you want in this genre, including partners you genuinely want to get to know, in situations that are real. This is done by putting readers inside the characters’ minds, letting Davis and Everett themselves explain why they acted as they did, mistakes and all. Don’t be surprised if you have to read the last few pages twice to best enjoy how things end. You won’t be sorry.
If you want a complicated, boy-meets-boy, family-mess kind of book with occasional heat, “When the Harvest Comes” is your book. Truly, this novel shines.
The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.
Books
Chronicling disastrous effects of ‘conversion therapy’
New book uncovers horror, unexpected humor of discredited practice
‘Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy’
By Lucas F. W. Wilson
c.2025, Jessica Kingsley Publishers
$21.95/190 pages
You’re a few months in, and it hasn’t gotten any easier.
You made your New Year’s resolutions with forethought, purpose, and determination but after all this time, you still struggle, ugh. You’ve backslid. You’ve cheated because change is hard. It’s sometimes impossible. And in the new book, “Shame-Sex Attraction” by Lucas F. W. Wilson, it can be exceptionally traumatic.
Progress does not come without problems.
While it’s true that the LGBTQ community has been adversely affected by the current administration, there are still things to be happy about when it comes to civil rights and acceptance. Still, says Wilson, one “particularly slow-moving aspect… has been the fight against what is widely known as conversion therapy.”
Such practices, he says, “have numerous damaging, death-dealing, and no doubt disastrous consequences.” The stories he’s collected in this volume reflect that, but they also mirror confidence and strength in the face of detrimental treatment.
Writer Gregory Elsasser-Chavez was told to breathe in something repellent every time he thought about other men. He says, in the end, he decided not to “pray away the gay.” Instead, he quips, he’d “sniff it away.”
D. Apple became her “own conversation therapist” by exhausting herself with service to others as therapy. Peter Nunn’s father took him on a surprise trip, but the surprise was a conversion facility; Nunn’s father said if it didn’t work, he’d “get rid of” his 15-year-old son. Chaim Levin was forced to humiliate himself as part of his therapy.
Lexie Bean struggled to make a therapist understand that they didn’t want to be a man because they were “both.” Jordan Sullivan writes of the years it takes “to re-integrate and become whole” after conversion therapy. Chris Csabs writes that he “tried everything to find the root of my problem” but “nothing so far had worked.”
Says Syre Klenke of a group conversion session, “My heart shattered over and over as people tried to console and encourage each other…. I wonder if each of them is okay and still with us today.”
Here’s a bit of advice for reading “Shame-Sex Attraction”: dip into the first chapter, maybe the second, then go back and read the foreword and introduction, and resume.
The reason: author Lucas F. W. Wilson’s intro is deep and steep, full of footnotes and statistics, and if you’re not prepared or you didn’t come for the education, it might scare you away. No, the subtitle of this book is likely why you’d pick the book up so because that’s what you really wanted, indulge before backtracking.
You won’t be sorry; the first stories are bracing and they’ll steel you for the rest, for the emotion and the tears, the horror and the unexpected humor.
Be aware that there are triggers all over this book, especially if you’ve been subjected to anything like conversion therapy yourself. Remember, though, that the survivors are just that: survivors, and their strength is what makes this book worthwhile. Even so, though “Shame-Sex Attraction” is an essential read, that doesn’t make it any easier.
The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.
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