Author Archives

Em Perper
Bookseller, writer, editor.

Can Technology Heal a Broken Heart?

Of all the ups and downs that I’ve had in my dating life, the most humiliating moment was having to explain to Siri that I got dumped.

— After her breakup, Kristen V. Brown documented her experimentation with different dating apps at Fusion.

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The Romantic Comedy Spectrum: A Reading List

Seems like the first movie I ever watched was a romance. It was a Disney movie; obviously, there’s a tortured love and a singalong. The most recent film I’ve seen, Trainwreck, is also a romance. What I’m interested in: the boundaries of the romantic comedy. Romantic comedies can be teen dreams (Clueless), homages to Shakespeare (She’s The Man), stunt-filled action romps (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), or cruel tearjerkers (P.S. I Love You). I’ve been inspired by romantic comedies before to Get My Shit Together, and I think that’s really cool. They can be timeless or comforting or really terrible, or all three. Romantic comedies—the best of them—allow us to project and to process. Here, I’ve collected a handful of stories centering on the creators and aficionados of the romantic comedy. Read more…

The Unaddressed Toll of Emotional Labor

I have this friend. We’ve known each other for a long time, and I enjoy spending time with him. When we meet for coffee, I listen to him explain the ins and outs of his passion–for the sake of anonymity, let’s say it’s flying kites–for hours. We watch YouTube videos of famous kite-flyers. I listen to his future kite-flying plans. When, finally, he asks, “And how are you?” I might mention a lead on my job hunt or a band I saw recently. Without fail, his eyes glaze over in 15 seconds or less. My life just isn’t that interesting to him, because at that moment I’m not listening to him talk about kites.

Jess Zimmerman is sick of my kite-flying friend. At The Toast, she explains what I (and countless other people, women especially) experience has a name: emotional labor. I’m providing free therapy, career advice and soundboarding for this kite aficionado. “Emily,” you might say, “That’s called being a good friend.” Yes! Yes, it is. But if my listening ear isn’t reciprocated, that’s not friendship. I’m being taken advantage of. My time is being wasted.

Emotional labor has followed the same path. We are told frequently that women are more intuitive, more empathetic, more innately willing and able to offer succor and advice. How convenient that this cultural construct gives men an excuse to be emotionally lazy. How convenient that it casts feelings-based work as “an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depths of our female character.”

Zimmerman goes in-depth in her essay, exploring privilege, entitlement, hashtags and the legacy of “women’s work.”

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The Selfies of Poets

What is the relationship between poetry and the selfie? This was one of the questions I sent a number of poets working in different modes. I said they could answer the question, or not, or if they wanted they could include some other type of text. I said they could interpret the term “selfie” as they saw it. – Kate Durbin

Duckface and surprised-face as the masks of comedy/tragedy. – Ana Božičević

At LitHub, Kate Durbin presents several dozen selfies–not her own, but those of contemporary poets, like Eileen Myles, Luna Miguel and Dodie Bellamy. She received faces, clouds and cityscapes, portraits of confusion and contentment. Their reflections (literal and literary) are tender and hilarious.

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#NoShame in Mental Illness: A Reading List

Photo: Kelsey

Even though I’ve lived with mental illness for years, I’m still learning about self-care, support systems and valuable resources. One of these resources is No Shame Day, initiated by poet and mental health advocate Bassey Ikpi. Ikpi founded The Siwe Project, which provides special mental health support for the Black community and other minority groups. On the first Monday in July, people take to social media and use the hashtag #NoShame to talk about living with mental illness and overcoming stigma and silence. Here, I’ve collected several stories about mental illness, many written by writers of color.

1. “Disrupting Domesticity: Mental Illness and Love as a Fact.” (Ashley C. Ford, The Toast, July 2015)

Ashley C. Ford interviews her partner, Kelly, about living with a person with mental illness–how to love her better, comfort her during panic attacks and hold her accountable. Kelly’s love for Ashley is so strong: “I love you for who you are. Anxiety is part of you. That part of you also shaped the person I love.” Read more…

Open Chest, Open Heart: 12 Years in Blue Man Group

You have to learn how to react in an egoless way, that’s really crucial. Let’s say an audience member is using their phone, just like five feet from you, filming you. An actor reaction is like, ‘Hey, you’re messing everything up,’ but a Blue Man reaction is more like, ‘Isn’t that interesting that that person is holding this in my face?’

–At Atlas Obscura, Isaac Eddy discusses his stint with Blue Man Group: the audition process, daily life on and offstage, the intense physicality of the role, and the collaborative, creative forces behind the show.

Same-Sex Marriage, America, and You: A Reading List

Photo: Ted Eytan

The United States wasn’t built on pluralism, unless you consider “which extremist Protestant denomination are you?” and an oppressed native population pluralism. The Founding Fathers had some good ideas (democracy!) but diversity and inclusion—by our contemporary definitions—weren’t among them. I like to think we’re getting there, that one day, we’re going to be known as a place where superficial tolerance or outright hate aren’t the norm, but wholehearted acceptance and appreciation are. That we won’t use religion as an excuse for bigotry or stasis. That marginalized communities will have equity, not just equality. That’s what I choose to ponder on the Fourth of July. How far we’ve come, how far we have to go.

This year, unsurprisingly, I’m thinking about Obergefell v. Hodges, better known as the case resulting in the Supreme Court decision to institute the right to same-sex marriage in all 50 states. I’m thinking about the weight of marriage and its legal ramifications, about assimilation versus acceptance. I’m reading, a lot, about how marriage equality isn’t the endgame. At its best, it’s a step on the way to something, somewhere better. At worst, it’s a misstep or a distraction. In the following list, I share different perspectives about same-sex marriage (all written by members of the LGBTQ+ community), as well as Pride, religious opinions, family and stereotypes.

1. “The Supreme Court. The Law. And My Same-Sex Marriage.” (Leah Lax, Houston Chronicle, June 2015)

Leah Lax left Hasidic Judaism and found happiness and intimacy with another woman. She shares the technicalities of their journey—healthcare, tax benefits, marriage—and the beauty in the details of of waking up next to the person you love. Read more…

The Celebrities of Vine Take the Stage

Photo: YouTube

Perhaps for this reason, the DigiTour show itself seems mostly designed to enable the boys to mug for the crowd as much as possible and the crowd, in turn, to scream as much as possible…Roughly once every show, a booming voice prods, “Now, let’s — take — some — SELFIEEEES,” in the way another announcer might implore a crowd to make some noise. The fans oblige.

— Reporter Ellen Cushing goes behind the scenes on DigiTour, a concert? performance? party? tour that brings seven young social media phenoms and their hundreds of thousands of fans together.

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The Cult Could Become a Church: On David Foster Wallace

I once dated a David Foster Wallace fanboy. You know who I mean: He’s white. He’s straight. He went to a small liberal arts college. He interrogates you on which DFW books you’ve read—the novels, or just the essays? He’s read Infinite Jest probably more than once. He thinks he has a unique take on the author’s work and the man’s life (and death).

My ex isn’t alone; DFW fanaticism swept the literary States in the early to mid-aughts. Prepare for the fans to be flamed (or the flames to be fanned): The End of the Tour (based on an account of Wallace’s Infinite Jest book tour) stars Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel and hits theaters on July 31. If you’ve never heard of this acclaimed author, treasure your last moments of innocence; then, read this primer at Vulture on DFW’s contested legacy.

David Foster Wallace has always been an unstable commodity. For two decades, the writer and his writings have been at the center of a cult with several branches. The first branch is other fiction writers, who also tend to be the most serious readers. This makes a certain obvious sense. ‘Infinite Jest’ is, on its face, the most daunting of novels; 1,079 pages, 96 of them endnotes; text in small type pointing you constantly to text in smaller type, necessitating multiple bookmarks; an immersion in two subcultures, junior tennis and addiction recovery; a time commitment to be measured in weeks, not days — two months for serious readers, Wallace thought…

The second branch are the magazine writers for whom his essays renewed the possibilities of a fast-aging New Journalism by clearing away Tom Wolfe’s cynicism and replacing it with a dazzling faux-amateur act.

The third are the academics; English professors hadn’t received the gift of fictional worlds so rich and susceptible to their hermeneutics since Nabokov, Beckett, or Joyce.

But before his suicide he compared his own fame only to that of a high-profile classical musician. 

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Megan Tan, ‘Millennial’ Radio Producer

When I first met Megan Tan, she was a talented photojournalist at the daily paper where I was a religion reporter. Today, Tan is the producer of Millennial, a new podcast about “maneuvering your 20s, after graduating college, and all the things that nobody teaches you.” Tan avoids artifice in her work; the podcast is from her perspective. She talks about her waitressing job, her boyfriend’s career successes, and conversations with her parents. Megan is down-to-earth: charming, relatable, hard-working. She records from her apartment. PRX interviewed Tan about her inspiration and goals for her first podcast.

PRX: How has Millennial changed the way you think about your future?

Megan Tan: I think a lot of the things that I was really scared of when I started this are so much more tangible than they have ever been, which is remarkable. I write down a lot of goals. I write down lots of lists and things that I want. For a while I had a list and I took a picture of it with my iPhone and had it as my background. A lot of things I had written just felt unachievable. One of those things was making a podcast. But now because I’ve created Millennial, a lot of the things that I wanted I’ve gotten lot closer to.

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