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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

‘Too Strong for That’: Margo Jefferson on Depression as Taboo in Affluent Black America

But one white female privilege had always been withheld from the girls of Negroland. Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female suffering and resistance. A privilege Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation, and discipline. Because our people had endured horrors and prevailed, even triumphed, their descendants should be too strong and too proud for such behavior. We were to be ladies, responsible Negro women, and indomitable Black Women. We were not to be depressed or unduly high-strung; we were not to have nervous collapses. We had a legacy. We were too strong for that.

I craved the right to turn my face to the wall, to create a death commensurate with bourgeois achievement, political awareness, and aesthetically compelling feminine despair. My first forays in this direction were petty. I conducted my own small battle of the books, purging my library of stalwart, valorous titles by black women and replacing them, whenever possible, with morbid, truculent ones by my sisters. Out with This Child’s Gonna Live, up with There’s Nothing I Own That I Want. Good-bye, My Lord, What a Morning, by Marian Anderson; hello, Everything and Nothing by Dorothy Dandridge. As for Mari Evans’s iconic sixties poem: I am a black woman…I tore it out of my black poets’ anthology and set fire to it in the bathroom sink.

I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who’d dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.

-From The Cut‘s excerpt of Negroland, Pulitzer Prize winner Margo Jefferson’s new memoir, about the expectations imposed upon her while growing up in what she calls “Negro America, where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.”

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‘The Loneliest Place for a Writer’: Gary Lutz on Writing (and Rewriting) Great Sentences

Early this summer I attended a disappointing writing workshop where a clearly unprepared instructor stressed the importance of creating air-tight sentences without bothering to suggest how. “Interrogate each one of your sentences,” she kept saying, then referring, over and over, to the first five lines of Lolita.

While the overall experience was unsatisfying, it reminded me that for a long time I have been wanting to go further with my development as a writer, at the sentence level. Since then, everywhere I’ve turned there have been signs pointing me in that direction.

Almost daily in the New York Times, ads for the Building Great Sentences audio and video offering from The Great Courses catch my eye. (Recently I ordered the corresponding book.)

More notably, not long ago, two different colleagues independently mentioned “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” this instructive essay by Gary Lutz that appeared in the January 2009 issue of The Believer, in which he includes lessons from legendary editor Gordon Lish, and cites many examples of great sentences by writers like Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte, Fiona Maazel, Dawn Raffel, Don DeLillo and others. Then a photocopy of the piece showed up in another writer’s photo on Instagram. I took it as a sign:

The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly.

There is another way to look at this:

The sentence is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not. The sentence is a situation of words in the most literal sense: words must be situated in relation to others to produce an enduring effect on a reader. As you situate the words, you are of course intent on obeying the ordinances of syntax and grammar, unless any willful violation is your purpose—and you are intent as well on achieving in the arrangements of words as much fidelity as is possible to whatever you believe you have wanted to say or describe. A lot of writers—many of them—unfortunately seem to stop there. They seem content if the resultant sentence is free from obvious faults and is faithful to the lineaments of the thought or feeling or whatnot that was awaiting deathless expression. But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than that for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art. They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words. This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity—a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing. The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech. A pausing, enraptured reader should be able to look deeply into the sentence and discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they share. The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other’s company—and that they cannot live without each other.

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‘We Stayed Children’: Akwaeke Emezi on Growing Up in Chaos in Aba, Nigeria

Photo via Flickr

I spent my entire childhood in Aba, a commercial town in the south of Nigeria, where both my siblings were born. When I came back to the country after leaving for college, I knew from my first circling of the Lagos crowd that the location of my childhood would be ammunition against people who thought I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t Nigerian enough. No one could argue with Aba. It was my best card, even better than being born in Umuahia, where my father and grandfather were born. It made me authentic in a way that was absolute; you couldn’t question if someone who grew up in Aba was a ‘real’ Nigerian. No one could say anything. Aba didn’t match the background they assumed for me: that I must have grown up outside Nigeria, because I smelled too foreign, right down to my blood. The truth felt like a story. I wanted to tell them we never had running water, that the cockroach eggs gelled into the egg grooves of the fridge door, that the concrete over the soakaway broke open and stayed open. The smell became part of our air and when one of the little chicks fell into the hole, my sister called me wicked for not helping it out. I said none of this, though. I just smiled at their shock and listened to the jokes about how Aba people can make and sell a fake version of anything, even a glass of water.

What I did tell people was how impressive it was that my parents kept their children as sheltered as they did in all the chaos of Aba during the 90’s and early 2000’s, with the way the town felt and tasted lawless. We got piles of books to read, bought secondhand from the Post Office on Ikot-Ekpene Road or sent from our cousins in London or pulled from my parents’ separate collections, and that’s how my sister and I ended up believing in fairies in the midst of riots. We had cats spilling over our carpets, a dog with raw bleeding ears, and several Barbie dolls sent from Saudi Arabia, where my mother moved to in ’96. I didn’t know I’d never live with her again. When our turkeys got fowlpox, we caught them and pinned them under our feet and learnt that you could treat the pox with palm oil. When the dogs got maggots, we learnt that applying careful pressure to the sore made them fall white and wriggling to the sand. We learnt not to handle bitterleaf and then touch your mouth, or peel yam and then touch your eyes, because the first ruins your tongue and the itch of the second can blind you. We mimicked the priests during Mass at CKC, driving home afterwards past the bodies dumped outside the teaching hospital. We stayed children.

– From an essay by Akwaeke Emezi about growing up in the Nigerian town of Aba, chosen and edited by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie, for a special literary supplement to the African lifestyle blog, Olisa. (h/t Mary Karr)

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The Girl Who Slept with God

Val Brelinski |The Girl Who Slept with God | Viking | August 2015 | 9 minutes (2,100 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the debut novel by Val Brelinski, as chosen by Longreads contributing editor Sari Botton, who writes:

On the approach to my fiftieth birthday, I’ve discovered a new hero: Val Brelinski, who at 58 has just published her debut book, The Girl Who Slept with God (Viking), a compelling, compassionate autobiographical novel about three daughters who’ve been raised by devout evangelical Christians in Idaho. After Grace, the oldest–and most devout–daughter returns from missionary work in Mexico pregnant with a baby whose father she claims is none other than God, she and tween-age middle daughter, Jory, are banished to an abandoned house in an isolated area until it’s time for the baby to be born. They’re deposited there by their eccentric science professor Dad, who is as fervent about jogging in circles around their back yard late at night in street clothes as he is about religious observance. At their new, temporary home, Jory befriends a sketchy guy who provides a series of opportunities for her to try out transgressing. Like Jory, Brelinski was the rebel daughter in her family, and eventually broke free, turning her back on religion for good. Here’s an excerpt.

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On Beauty: Franzen’s Shallow Male Problem

I had many problems with Purity, Jonathan Franzen’s new novel. The book had me hooked and turning pages from the first. There’s plenty of intrigue–a murder; the mystery of the title character’s parentage; unfolding backstories that link assorted melodramatic subplots, far-flung over geography and time. But to a large degree I was racing through it in search of some comment that might show the author to have a less shallow, more mature and nuanced perspective on women than his male characters exhibit. The absence of that was one of my biggest disappointments. In an essay at Salon, Lyz Lenz echoes and perfectly crystallizes one of my issues with Franzen’s depictions of women:

Pip, the main character, is often described as “pretty” and herself describes other women in terms of their beauty. Pretty faces, pretty fingers, beautiful women and beautiful weeping clog the pages of the book. After page 70, I began counting every time I saw the words “beauty,” “beautiful” and “pretty.” By page 412 I had reached 50 and all of them related to women. The problem with calling a woman beautiful is that it is not a description. Beauty is a judgment. With the exception of Anabel, none of the female characters in the book are allowed to move beyond this judgment. In the over 500 pages, Pip, Annagret and the rotating cast of ancillary women are never allowed more than their shades of beauty…

…the women of the novel lay flat on the page, subject to the whims of the male gaze that created them.

This is also a misstep Franzen has made off the page — he once famously declared that Edith Wharton’s greatest disadvantage was that she wasn’t pretty. Franzen, it seems, can’t see women beyond the binary of beautiful or not. It would seem to be both a personal problem and a writing problem. As Dickens and Wolfe learned, every kind of person should be allowed to be fully actualized on the page. Holding female characters under the thumb of narrative judgment denies them humanity. And this is a contrast to the thesis of “Purity,” which argues rather that the modern, digtal world of Facebook, Twitter and web journalism is alienating — bodies, though confounding, are the conduit to redemption. Yet, by not allowing female bodies to be truly seen, Franzen undercuts his own thesis. It is not the Internet that is the alienating force in his novel, but a writer who can see a dog better than his own protagonist.

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‘Perhaps Lucia Berlin Will Begin to Gain the Attention She Deserves’

Lucia Berlin, 1962. Photo by Buddy Berlin, © Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin

Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Work in Progress site has excerpted the first story from A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, the newly released collection of short fiction by the late Lucia Berlin–who died in 2004, and was largely overlooked while she was alive. In the book’s foreword, author Lydia Davis writes, “Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.”

Angel’s Laundromat is in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fourth Street. Shabby shops and junkyards, secondhand stores with army cots, boxes of one-socks, 1940 editions of Good Hygiene. Grain stores and motels for lovers and drunks and old women with hennaed hair who do their laundry at Angel’s. Teenage Chicana brides go to Angel’s. Towels, pink shortie nighties, bikini underpants that say Thursday. Their husbands wear blue overalls with names in script on the pockets. I like to wait and see the names appear in the mirror vision of the dryers. Tina, Corky, Junior.

Traveling people go to Angel’s. Dirty mattresses, rusty high chairs tied to the roofs of dented old Buicks. Leaky oil pans, leaky canvas water bags. Leaky washing machines. The men sit in the cars, shirtless, crush Hamm’s cans when they’re empty.

But it’s Indians who go to Angel’s mostly. Pueblo Indians from San Felipe and Laguna and Sandia. Tony was the only Apache I ever met, at the laundry or anywhere else. I like to sort of cross my eyes and watch the dryers full of Indian clothes blurring the brilliant swirling purples and oranges and reds and pinks.

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Yogurt for the Soul: Grace Talusan on Cultured Milk as Her Personal Salve

Over at The Butter, Grace Talusan has published this moving essay about becoming obsessed with making yogurt from scratch–while on a Fulbright Scholarship in her native Manila–as a way to distract herself from feeling helpless in the face of poor children she came upon who were living in horrible conditions, plus her own infertility and other personal woes:

With writing, I often make the mistake of confusing my work with my self-worth. I fear coming across as stupid or cliché. I berate myself for wasting precious time by not working enough, or by working too much on a piece that goes nowhere. And if the piece does get finished and shared somehow, so what? I remember handing my immigrant father a book that contained one of the first essays I published. He asked how much I had been paid. “Fifty dollars. And this contributor’s copy. It’s an honor to be published. Hundreds of other writers were rejected,” I started to say, but then I trailed off, demoralized and ashamed. I was sure that my father, who worked seven days a week, would not understand how a person could work on creating something for dozens of hours over several months for such meager rewards. He probably thought I was foolish for working myself ragged at several part-time jobs in order to support my writing time. And what did I have to show for all this effort?

However, I am not at all discouraged from failing at making yogurt. The failure doesn’t stop me from trying. I contemplate what went wrong and feel excited to try again. I know that each failure will teach me how to succeed…

…It isn’t until my niece asks me why I am always talking about yogurt that I realize how important it has become to me. An obsession, but also a distraction. A way to avoid talking about what happened to me one morning before brunch in an historical home in Malate. The taxi dropped me off on the corner beside a blue wheelbarrow, which was full of garbage and covered with a piece of cardboard. As the taxi drove away, I noticed empty the street was on a Sunday morning and then I turned my head to the wheelbarrow and spotted the bare legs of child sticking out from under the cardboard. My knees loosened and I grasped my friend’s arm because I was going down. Even though I hadn’t smelled decomposition, I was sure that child was rotting in the heat. But no, it was not as bad as all that. The child’s mother was asleep just behind the wheelbarrow, on her own piece of cardboard, with two other small children and a baby beside her. I felt ashamed of every complaint I had uttered in the country, and every privilege I possessed and would continue to enjoy. How could children be dead asleep on a sidewalk at high noon? What had they done the night before?

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Phoebe Gloeckner on ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ and the Women of Juarez

At The Rumpus, Whitney Joiner recently interviewed Phoebe Gloeckner, author of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the controversial illustrated novel about a girl who loses her virginity to her mother’s boyfriend, originally published in 2002, and just made into a feature film. It was the second time Gloeckner sat down with Joiner—a senior features editor at Marie Claire and co-founder of The Recollectors, a website and storytelling community for the children of parents who died of AIDs—the first time being a dozen years ago, for a Salon piece. This time, Gloeckner confessed that the story is autobiographical. The two also talked about the projects Gloeckner has been working on in Juarez, Mexico, including a novel based on one of the many young Juarenese women who have been killed there in recent years.

Rumpus: In the transcripts of our conversation last time, there’s a lot of discussion of why you didn’t want to call it an autobiography. At this point you’ve answered that so many times. I know you don’t like answering it. You talked about how, if it you’d written it as an autobiography, then you would hate her. You needed that separation because you needed to protect her.

Gloeckner: I had to look at her and accept her as any girl. But myself—I was ugly, I kept getting kicked out of school, I had no future, no one really liked me…

…I always resisted this thing about an autobiography, because honestly, what does it matter if it’s me or not. Every work of art is about the artist.

I’m finally admitting, yes, that’s my experience. I’ve given up trying to explain to people. It’s not like I just took my life; it’s not a document. I had no interest in saying, “This is me and this is my story.”

Rumpus: It’s easier to find compassion for a fifteen-year-old girl going through that kind of experience if it isn’t you.

Gloeckner: No one gives a fuck about an old woman trying to deal with her stupid past and problems!

I had all my old diaries and I was working from those. And I realized when I was reading them, I actually really liked that person.

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‘The Fight Is Yours’: Roxane Gay & Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing and Talking About Race

Photos via Wikimedia Commons and Flickr

RG: Discussions about race, particularly in mixed company, are often combative and contentious. How the hell do we talk about race?

TC: No idea. I just try to communicate with as much honesty and respect as possible. I think we should not forget that a not so insufficient portion of this country sees it as in their interest to disrupt and marginalize such discussions. Everyone isn’t convince-able…

RG: How can allies best serve as allies? What is an ally? Are they needed?

TC: I don’t know. I think it’s probably terribly important to listen. It’s terribly important to try to become more knowledgeable. It’s important to not expect that acquiring of that knowledge — in this case of the force of racism in American history — to be a pleasant experience or to proceed along just lines. They certainly don’t proceed that way for black people. It’s going to be painful. Finally I think one has to even abandon the phrase “ally” and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours.

-From a conversation between An Untamed State author Roxane Gay and Between the World and Me author Ta-Nehisi Coates about the challenges in writing and discussing race in our culture, at Barnes & Noble‘s site.

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‘Puro Amor’: A New Short Story by Sandra Cisneros

Still Life with Parrot and Fruit image via Flickr

The truth was that the Mister had always been dishonest. Not with his feelings but with his heart. He would be the first to tell you how honest he was about his dishonesties. He was like a chronic bed-wetter; he could not control himself. He would always be a bed-wetter even if he were not given a drop to drink. He had no wish to overcome this weakness. A big overgrown child indulging in whatever he saw, his eyes bigger than his pajarito.

And so Missus Rivera surrounded herself with animals. For what could be better than creatures when one has been betrayed, what finer emblem of loyalty and steadfastness and pure love.

Puro amor y amor puro. That’s what each pet gave her, pure and clean. Pure love and only love. Who wouldn’t want that?

“¿Quién quiere amor?” Missus called out. It was as if she was giving away treats and not simply love, for the creatures rose from all corners of the house and courtyard…

…The Guacamaya, who had the most acute hearing of all the household, stretched out his feathered neck, revealing flesh as pink as a toreador’s stockings, batted magnificent wings, bobbed like a prizefighter, the black orbs of his eyes growing larger, then smaller, larger, smaller, until finally he shrieked with wicked pleasure, “¿Quién quiere amor?” in the voice of a crone, as if making a mockery of the Missus.

-From “Puro Amor,” a new short story by The House on Mango Street author Sandra Cisneros–seemingly based on Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera–in The Washington Post’s 2015 Fiction Issue (second story, below one by Curtis Sittenfeld and above another one by Padgett Powell).

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