Author Archives

Sari Botton is a writer living in Kingston, NY. She edited the award-winning “Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY” and the NY Times Bestselling “Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY.” She is the essays editor for Longreads, and teaches at Catapult. She tweets at http://twitter.com/saribotton

Ferrante in Fragments of Her Choosing

At The New Republic, novelist Alexander Chee has an essay/review of Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, Ferrante’s new book of selected letters and interviews spanning nearly two-and-a-half decades. In the piece, Chee considers the way the press feels compelled to draw parallels between fiction and its authors’ lives; the way it treats women authors in particular; and the importance of anonymity for Ferrante, whose cover was allegedly blown in a recent The New York Review of Books article.

Many of these recent interviews are a pleasure to read—Ferrante’s professorial side is less didactic, more relaxed. But when asked, “Will you tell us who you are?” she answers: “Elena Ferrante. I’ve published six novels in 20 years. Isn’t that sufficient?” At this point, I have to agree. Why aren’t the novels enough?

But for all of her explanations on the topic of her withdrawal, the press appears, in these pages, determined to misunderstand her. If she seems repetitive at times, she is—but only because the questions are. Soon, she begins to sound like someone pleading for her life. At one point, she vows to stop publishing if she is exposed. And when she is asked to consider the legacy of her absence, she points a finger home:

“Those who became aware of the books later . . . as a result of the media attention, at least here in Italy, encounter them with an initial distrust, if not hostility, as if my absence were an offensive or culpable type of behavior. . .. The only thing I can do is continue my small battle to put the work at the center.”

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Hellish Days in the City of Angels: Michelle Tea on the L.A. Places She Hit Rock Bottom

At Buzzfeed, sober writer Michelle Tea takes readers on a tour of some L.A. establishments where she partied hard in 2001, the year she says she was hitting rock bottom with her addictions. Of The Frolick Room in Hollywood, she recalls:

This teeny-tiny bar situated on the walk of fame was the last place Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, was seen alive. But as much as a death wish as I appeared to have, the bar’s real draw was its status as one of Charles Bukowski’s primo haunts. Like all alcoholics who write, I adored Chinaski because he made my drinking seem literary, the activity of a working class hero, dirty and rebellious — which meant, since I was a girl, also feminist. I loved the redness of the bar, a vague redness, as well as how fucking awful the Hollywood mural on the wall was, and I loved the carnival promise of the neon sign outside and the weird, large, round, flat lamps on the inside. The Frolic Room was where I went when the 101 on-ramp had become tiresome and I needed a drink. Seated alone on a barstool I ordered a vodka whatever and sullenly nursed my drink. Eventually the phone rang, and the bartender answered it; turning to me, she said, “Someone is looking for a girl with blue hair. Are you her?” My boyfriend came to fetch me from The Frolic Room, took me to the taco truck down by the gay center for some food to help sober me up, then back to Tamarind, where I ate them with aggressive resentment, spilling cheese down my shirt.

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‘What’s So Good About’ Dylan

Book-Twitter is deeply divided over the news that Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. It seems as if half the lit world is affronted that a folk singer has been acknowledged in the same category as literary greats like Rudyard Kipling, Pearl S. Buck, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, while the other is thrilled that lyrics to the songs that reflected and affected social change in the second half of the twentieth century are being recognized as poetry.

In a prescient post on Jezebel last month, Catherine Nichols wrote about how, in reading Chronicles, Dylan’s 2005 memoir, she came to see the musician her father had introduced her to as a true literary artist, and to answer the question she’d been holding in her mind: “What’s so good about him?”

As a writer, Dylan layers in triplicate: there are the things that happen, the loopy ways he imagines them and the art that informs his imagination all concurrently, which is a literary technique I would love to learn myself. The book Peter Pan does this layering, but it’s sorted out clearly in time: Barrie narrates the event first, then re-situates it in Wendy’s family dynamics, then explores it in Wendy’s mind, through art and imagination (that’s Neverland). Dylan writes all these dimensions at once. The human touch begins in this constant rendering of art and subjectivity behind the words.

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Ayahuasca 2.0: Journeying to the Swampland of the Techie Soul

I live in Ulster County–hippie country–not far from a longstanding “Church of Ayahuasca,” where devotees take what they describe as life-altering psychedelic trips induced by drinking a precise mixture of B. caapi tea and chacruna leaf. While I’ve been curious about the experience, I haven’t been enough so to get past the vomiting that’s pretty much a standard part, and the stories I’ve heard about bad trips.

At The New Yorker, Ariel Levy reports on ayahuasca’s recent uptick in popularity in San Francisco among young people in the tech world, and in New York City among the young and the hip. As part of her reporting, she braves one of the ceremonies in Williamsburg, led by an ayahuasquera called Little Owl .

One at a time, we went into the front room to be smudged with sage on the wrestling mats by a woman in her sixties with the silver hair and beatific smile of a Latina Mrs. Claus. When she finished waving her smoking sage at me and said, “I hope you have a beautiful journey,” I was so moved by her radiant good will that I nearly burst into tears.

Once we were all smudged and back in our circle, Little Owl dimmed the lights. “You are the real shaman,” she said. “I am just your servant.”

When it was my turn to drink the little Dixie cup of muck she presented, I was stunned that divine consciousness—or really anything—could smell quite so foul: as if it had already been vomited up, by someone who’d been on a steady dieta of tar, bile, and fermented wood pulp. But I forced it down, and I was stoked. I was going to visit the swampland of my soul, make peace with death, and become one with the universe.

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Sin? Or Sickness? Treating Hasidic Masturbators, Adulterers and Gay Men with Psych Meds

At Narratively, Batya Ungar-Sargon provides a look into the phenomenon of Hasidic Jews being treated with heavy psych meds to steer them away from sexual behavior considered by the religion to be taboo. Men called askanim, refer members of their community who engage in anything considered sexually deviant to a handful of specialized psychiatrists, who treat their subjects’ theological transgressions as mental illness. Transgressions include but are not limited to: masturbation, same-sex attraction, and responding to the kind of sexual ennui that might result from marrying at 20 by engaging in affairs.

Joseph is one of many Hasidic Jews in the United States and Israel who are taken by community operatives like askanim to see psychiatrists for what are essentially religious, rather than psychiatric, difficulties. I spoke to twenty individuals in the New York area who had all been sent to the same five or six psychiatrists (and all knew others who had been through the same thing, often cycling between them), where they say they were prescribed anti-psychotics, hormones, or anti-depressants for masturbating, questioning the tenets of the community’s faith principles, experimenting with or even fantasizing about same-sex partners, or displaying “too high” a sex drive. The “symptoms” that psychiatrists take as evidence of disorders can vary, according to their patients. One woman told me that, when she confessed to an askan and later to a psychiatrist that the strictures of her life made her feel stuck, she was prescribed anti-depressants. When that didn’t solve anything, her askan took her to a second psychiatrist, who told her that she was getting a sexual high from her job, where she interacted with men, and diagnosed her with bipolar disorder. She was prescribed Abilify, an anti-psychotic medication. Another young woman, who had kissed a girl at school, was compelled by the principal to see the same psychiatrist. She was prescribed anti-psychotic medications, “to make you feel better and to decrease your temptations,” the doctor told her. “You’re not going to want to misbehave as much.”

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‘Equally Victimized by this System as By the Guy Who Raped Me’

At Cosmopolitan, Jillian Keenan reports on Dinisha Ball’s nightmare experience of being denied rape kits in more than one ER, for both legally invalid and “valid” reasons, after being drugged and sexually assaulted in Houston. By the time she was given one, it was shoddy, and too many hours had passed for evidence of the drugging to remain in her blood. Unfortunately, Ball is hardly alone. Not all hospitals are legally compelled to perform them, and very few have trained Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANEs).

It’s hard enough for sexual assault survivors to report a rape at all: Only 15.8 to 35 percent of survivors do, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. (Rape is so woefully underreported that exact statistics are impossible to come by.) And while the rape kit backlog has been well reported — the hundreds of thousands of untested kits sitting in police departments nationwide — what’s lesser-known is that getting a rape kit is not as simple as heading to the nearest emergency room. Once there, survivors are often faced with compounding obstacles to care, from the lack of emergency personnel trained to accurately perform rape kits, to buck-passing between insurers and hospitals around who is billed for that care, to loophole-filled state and federal laws that are often murky and unclear even to legal experts.

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The Wrong Woman to Eff With: Mary Karr on Being Groped in NYC

In 1997, at almost 32, I took a trip, alone, to Istanbul. Before I left, a male acquaintance suggested it was naive of me to think I’d be safe traveling in that part of the world–or anywhere, really–by myself. There was a condescension in his tone that annoyed me when he said it, but incited rage in me later when I found myself being groped in broad daylight by two young men as I crossed the Galata Bridge on foot. I was angry at my acquaintance for being right, angrier at the men who grabbed me for feeling entitled to do so, but also angry with myself for being so bold–my only regrettable anger of the three. In the New Yorker, memoirist Mary Karr recounts a recent, similar casual sexual assault by a “crotchgrabber” on a street in Manhattan.

Underlying all these actions exists the apparently unshakable tenet that any expression of male sexuality is somehow normal and every man’s right, whether or not a woman on the receiving end is repulsed or upset by it. All of us—male and female—envision all manner of erotic encounters without acting them out. But many of my male friends brush aside the behaviors that women find truly scary, the kind we know from experience can be the prelude to a nasty or even dangerous run-in. And something in the repetition of these behaviors—and in the culture’s blindness to the insult—wires itself into your body fibers and instills a debilitating sense that you’re not quite safe walking around.

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Baby’s First Beneficial Microbes: On Breastfeeding and Immunity

Image by William Herbert Galande, 1877 via Wikimedia Commons

If they held a contest, I’m fairly confident I’d win a prize for the World’s Weakest Immune System. A celiac sufferer (the real deal, diagnosed in 1967 at the age of two), I’ve always been quick to catch whatever bug is going around, and in fact I’m just over my sixth illness since January.

I’ve often wondered whether there’s a connection between my weak gut and my frequent infections, and whether it all has to do with not having been breastfed. (When I was born, in 1965, second-wave feminism frowned on breastfeeding, equating it with giving in to oppression, and suburbanites in my mom’s set considered it “barbaric.”)

The New Yorker has a fascinating book excerpt which supports that theory. It’s from I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by London-based science writer Ed Yong, to be published in August. The piece points to many of breast milk’s nutritional superior qualities, most importantly its apparent ability to fortify the body’s microbiome by feeding it with a variety of protective human milk oligosaccharides, or H.M.O.s, thus strengthening the immune system:

In a group setting, pathogens can easily bounce from one host to another, so animals need better ways of pro­tecting themselves. H.M.O.s provide one such defense. When a pathogen infects our guts, it almost always begins by latching onto glycans—sugar molecules—on the surfaces of our intestinal cells. But H.M.O.s bear a striking resemblance to these glycans, so pathogens sometimes stick to them instead. They act as decoys, drawing fire away from a baby’s own cells. They can block a roll call of gut villains, including Salmonella; Listeria; Vibrio cholerae, the culprit behind cholera; Campylobacter jejuni, the most common cause of bacterial diarrhea; Entamoeba histolytica, a vora­cious amoeba that causes dysentery and kills a hundred thousand people every year; and many virulent strains of E. coli. H.M.O.s may even be able to obstruct H.I.V., which might explain why more than half of infants who suckle from infected mothers don’t get infected, despite drinking virus-loaded milk for months. Every time scientists have pitted a pathogen against cultured cells in the presence of H.M.O.s, the cells have come out smil­ing.

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Sending the Elevator Back Down: Sara Benincasa on Artists Acknowledging Those Who’ve Helped Them Come Up

At The Rumpus, Catherine Cusick has a wide-ranging interview with writer and comedic actor Sara Benincasa, author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs (And Other Awesome Things They Don’t Teach You in School). They cover everything from definitions of success to definitions of good sex—with a detour toward Benincasa’s suicidal tendencies in her twenties, along the way. They also touch on the importance of artists helping and influencing one another, and of acknowledging that help once you succeed.

Benincasa: I have a friend who’s an artist with whom I’ve never worked, who does not, I’ve noticed, credit the individuals who help along the way. It’s always presented as though this person did it solo.

Rumpus: What are the consequences of pretending to have gotten there without help?

Benincasa: It’s a lie.

It’s not just about ego-scratching. It’s about acknowledging. If you say that you did it all yourself, you’re absolutely lying. Most people don’t want to work with liars. They’ll work with a liar if the liar makes them money and gives them credit, but not if a person’s lying extends to not making them money and not giving them credit.

Shonda Rhimes, Whitney Cummings, Patton Oswalt, Diablo Cody, Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Beyoncé, Cecily Strong, Adam McKay, Laverne Cox—all of these individuals are people I’ve seen talk not just about their own strength and self-reliance and hard work, but also about collaboration. That strengthens my belief that they are incredibly talented and hardworking on their own. It strengthens my respect for them.

If someone like Laverne Cox, who as a queer person of color, much less a trans person of color, much less a trans person of color working in the arts from the South? If someone who has the odds stacked against her on paper can acknowledge that her success has come as a result of collaboration, work, and self-reliance, why would I ever try to pretend that I wasn’t influenced, or that everything I do just comes from within my soul?

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How Author Helen DeWitt Uses Language to Address the Problems In Her Life

Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt. Photo by Zora Sicher/New York Magazine

In New York magazine, Christian Lorentzen has an interview with Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods. Owing to a combination of misfortunes, misunderstandings and publishing-related snags, the critically acclaimed novelist has been perennially broke. But, despite a history of brushes with suicide, she has a secret weapon against letting life’s problems get her down:

There is something else that has all along kept DeWitt going in the face of academic disappointments, publishing fiascoes, and overextended credit cards. DeWitt knows, in descending order of proficiency, Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese. Throughout her adult life she has taken refuge in these languages, and they were central to The Last Samurai. “The self is a set of linguistic patterns,” she said. “Reading and speaking in another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone.”

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