Author Archives

Em Perper
Bookseller, writer, editor.

A Chloe Caldwell Reading List

Photo courtesy of Erika Kleinman

On Tuesday, author Chloe Caldwell announced her second collection of essays, I’ll Tell You in Person: Essays on Intimacy & Identity, is forthcoming from indie publishers Emily Books/Coffee House Press in 2016. Caldwell is one of those writers who, once you encounter her work, inspires you to read everything she’s written, akin to Leslie Jamison or Cheryl Strayed (who happens to be her friend and mentor). My best friend introduced me to Chloe’s first collection of essays, Legs Get Led Astray, and it’s a book I carry with me when I’m in need of comfort. Caldwell’s second book, a novella called Women, garnered critical acclaim (and an Instagram shoutout from Lena Dunham). She’ll show you her demons if you’ll show her yours–her style is deeply personal, almost confessional, but Chloe never seems to write from a place of exhibitionism. She’s simply honest, and in an age of Internet posturing, that feels important. Chloe writes about people who are important to her. She’s important to me, so I thought I’d share some of the things she’s taught me.

#1. Find a community of people who a) are great friends, and b) help you hone your craft: “Who Am I? Two Writers Talk About Life and Nonfiction.”

Chloe took to her personal blog and published four installments of a conversation between her and her good friend, the writer Frances Badalamenti. Rather than an interview, I thought the informal nature of this conversation would be a good introduction to her style. Read more…

John Waters on TV, Bad Taste and Going Undercover

When I’m not frantically blogging for Longreads, I can be found with the writers of The Last Hurrah, a free comedy show in Frederick, MD (hosted by my boyfriend–disclaimer!) In honor of John Waters’ newest book, Carsick, the Last Hurrah team created a video of their attempts to “hitchhike” to Baltimore, Waters’ hometown. Kevin uploaded the video; it got a few hits. Then, silence. Last week, he received an email from an address he didn’t recognize. Guess who? John Waters sent us a video response. His hitchhiking sign says “The Last Hurrah.” That’s us! A weirdo comedy crew from a random Maryland city! We couldn’t believe it, and we still can’t, and all of these events have inspired me to (re)visit the not-so-underground filmmaker’s work. Luckily, Guernica published a new interview with The People’s Pervert just last week:

Guernica: You mentioned in your new book, Carsick, that you wouldn’t make a movie for under ten million now.

John Waters: It’s not that I wouldn’t—it’s that I couldn’t. Because what they want is movie stars. I’m not going to go ask movie stars to work for nothing. I’ve made nineteen movies, I have three homes, what am I going to say to them? “I don’t have any money”? And I’m not going to beg in public. To me, you know, I’ve made all these movies, they’re out there, they’re easy to get. Maybe I’m not going to make another movie. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s not like I haven’t spoken. I think it’s very easy to get my films; I think I was understood right from the beginning. And my books do great. So as long as I have a way to tell you another story—and I’m working on a TV project right now that I’m not allowed to talk about—but maybe it’ll be on TV. TV’s better today—there’s just way more people. So, who knows what’s going to happen? I always have a way to tell stories. That’s the only thing I can pass on: always have a backup career that is equally as important to you. Nothing lasts forever.

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‘For You is Your Religion, and For Me is My Religion’: Shorts, Sandals and Islam

Photo: micadew

I want to say something, something that indicates I’m not staring because I’m not familiar with how she chooses to cover herself. Something that indicates that my mother dresses like her. That I grew up in an Arab state touching the Persian Gulf where the majority dresses like her. That I also face East and recite Quran when I pray.

“Should I greet her with A’salamu alaikum?” I ask myself. Then I look at what I picked out to wear on this day. A pair of distressed denim short shorts, a button-down Oxford shirt, and sandals. My hair is a big, curly entity on top of my head; still air-drying after my morning shower. Then I remember my two nose rings, one hugging my right nostril, the other snugly hanging around my septum. 

I am a practicing Muslim. I pray (sometimes), fast, recite the travel supplication before I start my car’s engine, pay my zakkah (an annual charitable practice that is obligatory for all that can afford it) and, most importantly, I feel very Muslim. There are many like me. We don’t believe in a monolithic practice of Islam. We love Islam, and because we love it so much we refuse to reduce it to an inflexible and fossilized way of life. Yet we still don’t fit anywhere. We’re more comfortable passing for non-Muslims, if it saves us from one or more of the following: unsolicited warnings about the kind punishment that awaits us in hell, unwelcomed advice from a stranger that starts with “I am like your [insert relative],” or an impromptu lecture, straight out of a Wahhabi textbook I thought was nonsense at age 13.

— I admire author Thanaa El-Naggar for staking a place for herself in her faith, despite opposition from conservative adherents and ignorant detractors. Read more of “Practicing Islam in Short Shorts” at Gawker True Stories.

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Actress Julia Cho on Asian-American Representation, Diversity and Self-Care

Consider skipping Aloha, Cameron Crowe’s latest film–someone made the dreadful decision to cast Emma Stone as an Asian character, despite a multitude of talented Asian-American actresses. It’s not news that equal representation in the media has a long way to go. As Nicole S. Chung put it, “I wanted to know what this lack of representation — and the slow but (one hopes) steady ascent to better representation — looks like to someone inside the industry.” So Chung sat down with Julia Cho, actress and co-founder of Artists at Play.

What do you tell people who ask you why visibility is so important … people who say, “Why can’t it just be good art?” or “Why can’t it just be entertaining?”

The show might be good, the acting might be great, but at some point, even if I’m enjoying it, I will wonder — why are all these characters white? Is there any reason? You feel there’s some power being taken away from you. As an audience member, you also want to feel like you’re part of the story, part of the world where it’s set. And as an artist, you want to express common truths; explore and examine and present a version of humanity. How can you do that when there’s still distance and displacement for people of color? When you’re not even trying to meet their basic human need for connection?

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‘We Have to Do Better’: A Reading List on the Charleston Church Massacre

Yesterday, Marc Lamont Hill tweeted, “I’m going to need all White people to denounce this ugly act of racist domestic terrorism.” This reading list is me denouncing the actions of a white supremacist terrorist, who visited a Wednesday night Bible study at one of the most important, sacred sites of Black religious and political freedom with the exclusive intention of killing attendees in cold blood. White people: we have to do better. We can’t deflect responsibility for this tragedy; we can’t blame this on mental illness (many of my friends and I deal with mental illness every day; none of us have murdered anyone). We have to demand accountability from one another and stand up for people of color—in the streets, in our Facebook feeds, in our offices and homes.

1. “Charleston Church Massacre: The Violence White America Must Answer For.” (Chauncey Devega, Salon, June 2015)

White Americans will not have to look in the mirror and ask, “what does it feel like to be a problem.” In the aftermath of recurring mass shooting events, and right-wing domestic terrorism, it is essential that they start to practice such acts of introspection in the interest of the Common Good.

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Argentina’s Stolen Children

Photo: BoNoNoBo

It sounds like something out of a bestselling dystopian novel, but it’s horribly real: in the 1970s, tens of thousands of so-called subversives were murdered by a despotic Argentinian government. What happened to their children? They grew up under the roofs of their parents’ killers. Distraught, the women of Argentina organized. Now, two of the most famous siblings in the country are under investigation–could they be children of the desaparecidos? Francis Goldman investigates in the New Yorker.

On April 22, 2010, the country’s four largest daily newspapers published a letter signed by Marcela and Felipe. “Like so many adopted children, we don’t know our biological identities, but like any other person we’ve formed our own identities in the course of our lives,” they wrote. “We’ve never seen any concrete proof that we are children of the disappeared. . . . The political use of our story seems unjust. . . . Thirty-four years ago our mother chose us to be her children. And we, every day, choose her to be our mother.” The letter did little to dispel the general impression of the siblings as captives, whose every utterance was controlled by Grupo Clarín and its lawyers, and it only added to the public’s perception of them as having a sense of aggrieved entitlement. Any adopted children born in Argentina in 1976, especially those with as many irregularities in their adoption records as Marcela and Felipe, could be subject to an investigation. The Noble Herreras’ long history of resistance made it look as if they were desperate to hide the truth.

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Fancy Dogs and Empty Bank Accounts

Photo: Fouquier ॐ

I know that I won’t be getting a Frenchie this week, or even this year, but I also know that I am not going to give up. In all the time I’ve spent blustering about my plan, researching breeds, and ending up disappointed, I’ve never allowed myself permission to get this dog just because I want it. I want it because it will comfort me when I feel nervous. Because it will be someone to talk to, and who will talk back to me in that uncanny, silent way that dogs do. Because it will force me to focus on caring for something else, and pull me out of my inescapable self-absorption—a student with two jobs trying to carve out an identity. Because people who don’t have a lot of money but work their asses off need things—comforts, love—as much as anyone. We are experts at saving, scrimping, and sacrificing. We should be able to have fancy dogs, too.

— How do our desires shape our identity? In the Morning News, Poet Amanda Williams is facing this question head-on: she is a graduate student with limited finances, but all she wants is a purebred French Bulldog.

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Six Stories About the Swimming Pool

I don’t know where you live, but where I live, it’s 97 degrees on a Friday in June. After a brutal winter, I try to remember this is what I longed for. My commute home liquidates. Drips slide down my spine, disappearing into the waist of my government-approved pencil skirt. Yesterday, I couldn’t take it: I wore shorts. I’m yearning for my grandparents’ swimming pool; its strange shape and dense vegetation are different from the community pools I frequented as a child. Theirs is utterly private, difficult to maintain, and very, very cold. Ready to grab your towel? Take a dip in these six stories about swimming pools.

1. “Who Gets to Go to the Pool?” (Brit Bennett, New York Times, June 2015)

Oasis or battleground? Swimming pools have long been sites of racial tension in the United States–this month, a police officer pulled a gun on a black, unarmed, bikini-clad young woman after she was attacked (physically and verbally) by white poolgoers.

2. “Woman Overboard: How Swimming in a Rooftop Pool Saved Me From Addiction.” (Susan Shapiro, The Observer, July 2014)

Susan Shapiro traded unhealthy habits for a new obsession: swimming laps atop her apartment building. Her fondness for exercise accidentally landed her in physical therapy, where she learned the importance of pacing herself.

3. “Size.” (Leanne Shapton, The Paris Review, July 2012)

Two summers ago, I read and loved Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton’s memoir of her life in pools. Beautiful meditations on training for the Olympic trials as a teen and descriptions of swimming pools all over the world accompany photos of bathing suits and miniature paintings. What better to read poolside? Here, the Paris Review excerpts Shapton’s book.

4. “The Wet Stuff: Jeff Henry, Verrückt, and the Men Who Built the Great American Water Park.” (Bryan Curtis, Grantland, September 2014)

A water park is a swimming pool on steroids, right? Grantland introduces you to Jeff Henry, the Steve Jobs of water parks. (Henry’s latest ride is called “Verrückt”–that’s “insane,” in German. It’s over 17 stories tall; it’s the tallest water slide in the world.)

5. “The Purest Form of Play.” (Miranda Ward, Vela, April 2013)

This award-winning essay is a favorite of Vela editor Sarah Menkedick: “[It’s] one of those pieces I return to when I start to feel cynical and burnt out.” Maybe the summer heat is getting to you, too. Maybe someone pooped in your metaphorical (or literal) pool. Ward’s essay moved and encouraged me, too. It’s about perseverance and acceptance, in or out of the pool.

6. “Too Fat to Swim.” (Ragini Nag Rao, Rookie, October 2014)

I was 18 the first time I swam. I took a step into a sectioned-off part of Calcutta’s biggest lake, and I was scared. Ragini dreamed of performing daring athletic feats and reveled in basketball and cricket. But her size, self-consciousness and the taunts of her family held her back from embracing her true self. After years of struggling with an eating disorder, she shakes off the haters and plunges into the depths of self-love.

‘Gentle Exploration’ in Video Games

The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home launched in 2013 and became an instant classic among video game fans. The atmospheric game cast you as a girl exploring her family’s new home, half-unpacked, in search of clues about your missing sister. The story told through that exploration—the pillow fort and stained pizza boxes in the VHS-littered living room, the printed zines and childhood scribblings spilling out of storage areas—is so delicate that to talk too much about it collapses it. But the game, along with other rebelliously observation-oriented, “action”-averse games like Dear Esther, helped prototype an entire genre: Telling the stories of people, of a place, through gentle exploration.

— Leigh Alexander explores the importance of the home and its artifacts in different video games.

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What It’s Like to Live On Top of a Glacier

The tourists were always curious about glacier life, and I did my best to give them what they wanted. I told them about the hummingbirds that stopped by on their way to the moss-covered mountains, but I didn’t tell them about the time a lightning storm closed in on us and I thought for sure we’d all get electrocuted. I told them how strange it was to live in a world almost totally drained of color, but not about the elaborate plans another guide and I had come up with to escape the glacier on foot if we ever needed to. I told them the food was great and the mushers and dogs were like family and I had the best job in the world. Then I’d go back to my tent and cry.

— The Atavist Magazine presents “Welcome to Dog World,” Blair Braverman’s account of life atop an Alaskan glacier, leading dog-sledding excursions for tourists and isolated from the rest of the world.