Author Archives

Em Perper
Bookseller, writer, editor.

Session In Progress: Five Stories About Therapy

My therapist hasn’t called me back. Let me clarify: my potential therapist. I read her LinkedIn profile. I read her website. I tried to find her Facebook page. I left a voicemail on the office phone number. And then I received a call from a number I didn’t recognize, but it sounded like a butt-dial, so I don’t think it was her. But still, that was two months ago. “Just call her back!” you say. Hmm, no, I don’t think so, because what if the butt-dial was her way—subconscious or no—of rejecting me? Like I said: I need therapy. So do the folks included in this week’s reading list. We’re going all over the world: from improv classes, hospitals and living rooms in Belgium, New York City and Minnesota.

1. The Town of Geel

“Psychiatric Community Care: Belgian Town Sets Gold Standard.” (Karin Wells, CBC News, March 2014)

“The Geel Question.” (Mike Jay, Aeon, January 2014)

Since the Middle Ages, Geel has been a safe haven for the mentally ill. Now, its numbers are dwindling. Will this beacon of family-based psychiatric care survive? Read more…

‘Why Don’t Pure Loves Meet?’ On the Radio in Afghanistan

Photo: Lig Ynnek

In this beautiful piece from Matter, Mujib Mashal takes the reader to the Afghani airwaves, into the hearts of its listeners. From the complications of arranged marriage to online dating woes, the youth of Afghanistan have a lot on their minds. DJ Ajmal Noorzai solemnly shares their stories on his program, The Night of Lovers. 

When the show first aired, callers were reticent to speak honestly. But slowly, with Ajmal’s guidance, they opened up — so much so that stories had to be debated before they were aired. In one, a young girl named Sameera sobbed as she recounted falling for a man other than her arranged spouse. Honor is everything in Afghan society; it is a highly shameful act for a female member of the family to engage in relations of any kind with a man before marriage. Producers had to be careful to safeguard Sameera’s identity.

Sameera had been engaged to a man for three years; he was a good man. But no matter how hard she tried “to send her heart his way,” she couldn’t. Her family — her sister, her brother — tried to help her forget the man she truly loved, without success. She felt trapped. “I just wanted to share this with the listeners. I am a very pained girl. Good night to you — and I pray that those who have not been united with each other, they meet again. God protect you.”

What struck Ajmal about Sameera’s story wasn’t just that she was speaking honestly, openly, about a taboo subject. It was that she was connecting to thousands of others united in pain and heartache. Afghanistan is a nation of suppressed pain, in its every color and form. A nation awash in PTSD. We have seen such extremes that what elsewhere would draw the attention of psychologists here is considered normal. Pain is something to be dealt with in solitude, to be “only shared with the mirrors,” as the poet Qahar Asi put it.

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The Emptiness of Offense

I’m not brave, and that’s the fucking problem. I just can’t write about anything else but what I actually care about. While I was writing this novel, I kept thinking, black people are going to resent that this discussion [of mixed-race identity] is even happening because some people are going to see it as people trying to distance themselves from blackness. Some people are going to see it as divisive and taking away much needed power in the black community by making it even smaller. Mixed people, my fellow mixed people, don’t tend, as a group, to have a great sense of humor about this stuff. They’re very sensitive about it and there’s a lot of trauma there, so even if they only slightly disagree with me, they’re going to be incredibly furious about that. White people, some of them are going to react by saying, “Why does it matter?” Because a lot of them are in the position where they don’t have to acknowledge how integral identity is as part of their lives. Then I was like, well who’s left?

—At Salon, Laura Miller interviews the incomparable novelist Mat Johnson about his new book (Loving Day), as well as satire in the time of the internet, the righteousness of the offended and mixed-race identity.

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The Chaotic Nature of Working at Victoria’s Secret

Victoria’s Secret employees may be scheduled for more than 30 hours of work across five days in a week, but ultimately work only 10 of those hours, the complaint said. Aside from the logistical hassle of planning life around such an unpredictable schedule, it makes earning a living wage even tougher. At a $9 minimum wage, the difference between 30 scheduled hours and the 10 actually worked turns out to be earning $270 versus $90 in a week, or $1,080 against $360 in a month.

— Shopping mall staples rely on “call-in” shifts, and the legality of this system, which may prevent part-time employees from finding other work and pursuing higher education, is in question. Employees around the country are fighting back, and the ramifications for workers’ rights and financial profit are huge. BuzzFeed News has the story.

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This Queer Hoosier Loves Her Home State

Photo: Matt B.

Don’t punish Indiana’s citizens for one governor’s decision, Ashley C. Ford implores. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, supported almost exclusively by Governor Mike Pence, doesn’t reflect her Indiana:

“I don’t know every Hoosier, but I can’t find one who supported the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Everyone I know—myself included—has been speaking out, marching, letter-writing, doing whatever we can think of to get this bill repealed or tweaked.”

Ashley is especially invested in Indiana. It’s where she’s from, her home state. It’s where she came to terms with her own sexuality, kissed a girl, and found a supportive LGBTQA community:

I only moved an hour down the road to Indianapolis, but it was a new world for me, a chance to reinvent myself. Here, I casually mentioned my bisexuality to people who didn’t blink an eye. I attended Pride and patronized gay and lesbian bars. For years I’d been speaking about equal rights and human rights, but in Indy I began to let myself write about and speak publicly about my queer identity.

I didn’t leave Indiana because I didn’t feel safe or loved or understood. Yes, there were issues with my family, but I was still in Indiana when I found my community, and when I found acceptance. I feel like I lived two lives in Indiana: one that got me, and one I never gave the chance to get me. But that doesn’t seem very rare. It seems like the complicated relationship most people have with their hometowns.

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How Comics Helped Me Face My Diagnosis

Let me break my situation down for you in a way my doctor did not. Not much is known about my autoimmune disease, except its associations with other diseases and the antibody marker for it, anti-Jo1. Antisynthetase Syndrome is incredibly rare. One to ten people in every million have it. For comparison, according to the Lupus Foundation of America, approximately 1.5 million people in the U.S. have lupus. Whereas approximately 318 to 3,180 people in the U.S. have Antisynthetase Syndrome. I felt very alone…

Doctors give characters in tv shows, movies, and comics a moment to let the news sink in. Doctors in real life have other patients waiting to be told different news. They talk straight through all of the things you should now know about your situation, ask if you have any questions and then rush you on your way. Maybe this isn’t true everywhere. Maybe somewhere there are doctors who really say, this is serious, take your time, I’ll let you have your moment of silence.

— For years, unhelpful doctors and misdiagnoses plagued Al Rosenberg’s life. At Women Write About Comics, she discusses the validation she found in graphic novels and comics.

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The People on Our Postage Stamps: A Reading List

Flannery O’Connor is going to be on a stamp! I’m going to actually mail those postcards I bought years ago. In my enthusiasm, I learned there have been almost 800 different folks on the U.S. stamp—authors, like O’Connor, but also blues singers, inventors, athletes and politicians. After much deliberation, I chose to feature five stamped individuals: an inventor, an entertainer, an activist, a journalist and a short story mastermind. Don’t worry, I linked to their stamps.

1. Buckminster Fuller: “Dymaxion Man.” (Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, June 2008)

Buckminster Fuller wrote rambling manifestos and dreamed of cookie-cutter bathrooms and cars that flew. This inventor’s stamp is as strange and wonderful as his failed, fanciful inventions. Read more…

Heidi Julavits and the Democracy of the Diary

It just wasn’t that interesting to read the entries in chronological order, so I started to play around with different ways to arrange them, like dividing them up into categories like “Friends” and “Children” and “Weather” and … I don’t know, “Sweaters.” But all of those categories kept collapsing back into themselves. “Friends” and “Sweaters” belonged together, and so on. Eventually I had one big pile of entries again. The metaphor I’ve been using to describe my eventual assembly process is the “mix tape metaphor.”

— Heidi Julavits kept a meticulous diary as a child. In preparation for a new project, she returned to journaling, only to discover that the journal itself would be her project. LARB interviews Julavits about her book, The Folded Clock, the result of two years’ diary entries, “when my life counted as my job.”

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The Art of the Con: Four Stories About Scams

This morning, as I filed folders at my day job, I turned to the podcast Criminal for comfort. Today’s episode was Gil From London, the story of a strange man posing as a British sixty-something who almost seduced an American widow named Karen. There are lots of well-told stories about con men, Craigslist hoaxes and financial scams—here are a few of my favorites.

1. “Crowded House.” (Tad Friend, The New Yorker, May 2013)

Mix cutthroat New York real estate, a too-good-to-be-true apartment, an unstable photographer to the stars and dozens of international tenants. Read more…

A Single Dad Takes a Fatherhood Development Class

The last student to arrive for fatherhood class was the only one holding a baby, and a dozen men looked up from their desks to stare. Paul Gayle, 19, had a pink diaper bag hanging off a shoulder decorated with tattoos of marijuana leaves, and a crying 7-month-old in his arms. “Come on, girl, chill out,” Paul said, carrying the baby to a seat in the corner. He offered her a rattle, and she swatted it away. He gave her a bottle, and she only cried louder. Finally, he reached into the diaper bag and took out a pacifier for her and a shot of Goody’s Headache Relief for himself.

“Sorry for the noise, y’all,” he said. “We’re both a little mad at the world today.”

“No problem,” the teacher said. “I’m up here talking about being a dad, and you’re doing it.”

“I’m trying,” Paul said. “But damn.”

— Paul wants his baby girl to have the world, and he’s participating in the President’s 16-part fatherhood course to get there. But his girlfriend won’t return his calls, he can’t hold down a job and he lives in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Eli Saslow has the story at the Washington Post.

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