The Longreads Blog

Before You Eat or Drink Anything, Ask An Expert

AP Photo/Mal Fairclough

I love Scotch and Japanese whisky. I don’t love hearing peoples’ descriptions of whiskies’ flavors. Can’t you smell the vanilla pudding laced with new forest berry skins and the grated hulls of lightly charred hazelnuts? Not necessarily, but I can tell the difference between an Isley and a Speyside. Would I enjoy whisky even more if I had a whisky sommelier to guide me?

Sommeliers are specialists who use deep knowledge to suggest and pair wines with food. For the Washington Post MagazineJason Wilson shows the way experts have expanded that oenophile role to everything from chocolate to hot sauce to cheese, and he examines how specialists become experts, what expertise offers consumers, and how food education mingles with Capitalism. So do mustard and honey and hot sauce sommeliers help us experience culinary pleasures more fully, or make pleasure overly complicated?

As the class chuckles over that distinction, Frankenberg reminds us: “Remember, taste is always subjective. No matter if a professional tells you, ‘This tastes like wet slate from the Loire Valley.’ ” I’ve heard the same sentiment expressed by almost every taste expert I’ve visited. And yet, every one of these experts has a vested interest in taste being way more codified than subjective.

Indeed, what the rise of specialized taste education, the cult of sensory analysis, and the wine-ification of everything means is that taste is becoming more and more codified all the time. There are good tastes and bad tastes; not only that, there’s a growing caste of gatekeepers in every field who are keeping score on what tastes great, middling and flawed. Maybe this is what morality or philosophy looks like in an increasingly post-religious, post-intellectual, materialistic United States. We are a people in need of an authority, a higher voice, some guidance — even if it comes from behind the cheese counter. Maybe, for many affluent Americans, the sommeliers of everything represent something shaman-like. Listen to me. I am your one true sommelier.

Read the story

Why Must We Tarnish the Glittering Legacy of Italo Disco with Petty Squabbles

Den Harrow, either during a performance or just after escaping from a pack of wild boars.

Italo Disco was the disco that no one really needed: “English-language vocals, whose repetitive lyrics, often accented and malaprop-laden, were set to catchy melodies filigreed with synthesizers.” One of its biggest stars was Den Harrow, an invented performer cobbled together out of Tom Hooker (the singer) Stefano Zandri (the on-stage lip syncer). At GQ, Alice Gregory tells the story of Den’s sharp rise, unsurprising decline, and the fallout from two blowhard, sort-of partners who really, really don’t like one another.

Tawny and taut, with twinkly eyes and TV teeth, Tom looks even more like Rob Lowe than Rob Lowe looks like himself. He has the appearance (faultless) and bearing (dauntless) of a very lucky person, which he is, and which he is usually capable of remembering. Tom has a loving family, a beautiful home, a creative career, and lots of money. He also has a mortal enemy. When Tom talks about Stefano Zandri—or, as he calls him, “Stefano or Den or Whatever”—the grace with which his life has been blessed disappears, instantly it seems, from the foreground of his mind. He begins to swear and to brag; he becomes bothered by minor three-decade-old slights. Tom mocks Stefano for not speaking English, for “not having a pot to piss in.” He calls him “obnoxious,” a “chronic liar,” “a horndog with low standards and no selection process.” To observe this transformation, from blessed family man to apoplexy incarnate, is to bear witness to something almost mythic. Like if Achilles’ problem wasn’t his heel but his toe, which he stubbed, repeatedly, over the years and which every time he did sent him into a temporary infantile rage.

To be fair, Stefano himself isn’t above Tom-directed barbs, which he spouts in Facebook posts, Instagram comments, and national radio interviews, and which he tends to express with an impressive, almost poetic specificity. “Needle dick” is one of his preferred insults. For years he’s been preoccupied with the notion that Tom bought the exact same Porsche as he did in 1989. On Facebook, he’s called Tom “envious and troubled,” a “clown,” a “brown-noser with no personality,” a “small penis man,” a “Coward!” “You should be ashamed that you sold your voice,” he’s written. “You are clumsy and you have a bad energy as you are a bad person.” A few weeks after writing “I would put your head in your butt for real,” Stefano threatened Tom, saying, “I know where you live. I will come to Vegas and kick your flaccid ass.” Tom’s two daughters were 5 and 6 at the time, and the threat to his family infuriated him. Tom insisted to me that he wasn’t actually scared but then added, “I don’t know—maybe he has some guys around!”

Read the story

‘I Spent Two Years Researching Before I Wrote a Single Line’: Geeking Out With Marlon James

Mark Seliger / Penguin Random House

Adam Morgan| Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (1,962 words)

I understand why Marlon James calls his new trilogy “an African Game of Thrones” — it builds the right expectations for an epic fantasy with dozens of characters spread across warring kingdoms. However, judging by the first book in the series, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, another apt comparison, especially when it comes to style and structure, might be “an African Gormenghast.”

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series (1946-1959), if you’ve never read it, is a dense literary labyrinth that makes A Game of Thrones and its sequels look downright old-fashioned. The story of a wealthy heir who lives in a vast, crumbling castle, Gormenghast has never been wildly popular thanks to its challenging style, but it does hold cult status among scholars and writers like Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Sofia Samatar, even Harold Bloom. “Reading it at the age of 13,” Samatar has written, “I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language.”

Growing up in the suburbs of Kingston, Jamaica, Marlon James didn’t have access to many fantasy novels, but he did stumble upon Gormenghast as an adult. “It was like a blueprint for how the fantastical grows up,” he says, echoing Samatar, adding that it’s the one book that “continues to rule his life.”

Perhaps that’s why Black Leopard, Red Wolf takes so many narrative risks. It’s a sprawling series of stories within stories that fold back on themselves, a hypnotic spoken-word fable full of sex, violence, and magic. It’s not quite what you’re expecting — and it’s all the better for it. Read more…

Lean On

Getty / Bloomsbury Publishing

Briallen Hopper | excerpted from Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions | February 2019 | 25 minutes (6,215 words)

I like to lean. Too much of the time I have to hold myself up, so if an opportunity to swoon presents itself, I take it. When I’m getting a haircut and the lady asks me to lean back into the basin for a shampoo, I let myself melt. My muscles go slack, my eyes fall shut, and there is nothing holding me except gravity and the chair and the water and her hands on my head. I feel my tears of bliss slide into the suds.

In photos I am often leaning. When I’m not resting my head on someone’s shoulder, I am hugging a column in a haunted castle in Great Barrington or bracing myself against a big block of basalt on a pedestal in a Barcelona park. At home alone, I improvise with bookshelves and doorjambs, but sometimes I need to lean on something alive. Seeking support on a stormy night, I run out into the rain and lean against the dogwood tree in front of my house until the wet bark soaks through my coat. The world is my trellis.

Ten years ago, I bought a Gordon Parks print of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward leaning against each other by lamplight on a big brass bed. They are sitting side by side, eyes closed, serene. He is leaning more heavily, his body slanted into hers, his head on her shoulder. She is resting more gently, her cheek against the top of his head. Her face is half-illuminated, half-eclipsed. They seem solemn and private and young. He is quiet in her shadow.

I hung the photograph over my bed. Next to it I tacked another 1950s Paul and Joanne picture I tore out of a book. They are leaning on a bed again, and he is still slumped against her shoulder, but this time the lean seems more in league with an audience. They are both meeting the photographer’s gaze and smiling small smiles. Her eyebrows are slightly raised; she might be sly or smug. She is holding a cup of tea in one hand, and his head, proprietarily, with the other. He is supine and sated and holding a glass of wine.

Paul and Joanne liked to lean for the camera. For their 1968 LIFE cover promoting Rachel, Rachel (she starred, he directed), they are layered on wall-to-wall carpet; she is reclining in the foreground, and he is her blue-eyed backrest. In yet another famous photo from an earlier era (Joanne is still in gingham, not yet in Pucci), they are leaning back to back with their shoulders against each other, their mutual pressure holding each other up, with an isosceles triangle of space between them, and a sturdy baseline of brick patio beneath them.

I like to fall asleep under images of leaning every night and wake up beneath them every day.

I like to believe that leaning is love.
Read more…

Every Day I Write the Book

Santiago Felipe / Getty

Michael Musto | Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (2,035 words)

Like a really good book, life has given me way more chapters than I ever expected. Alas, I couldn’t have predicted that as an Italian-American kid growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 1960s. It was a time of hippie-dippie love and peace — which I read about and saw constantly on TV — though those warm and rosy feelings were apparently reserved only for the young; older people were considered business suited, untrustworthy, corrupt, and pretty much doomed. At the local movie theater, I had the misfortune of catching the 1968 youth exploitation drama Wild In The Streets, in which anyone over 30 was forcibly retired and those over 35 were rounded up for re-learning camps. Seeing this flick at an impressionable age, I wasn’t worldly enough to reject its ideas or realize it was a youth fantasy as perpetuated by the suits. I thought it was a true harbinger of things to come and was horrified by every melodramatic moment. The movie haunted my adolescence, and I went to school sensing that hitting 30 was going to mean the end of meaningfulness, so I’d better live and achieve to the max until I was ready to be carted away.

Listen to Michael Musto read “Every Day I Write the Book” on the Longreads Podcast.

Well, I’m 63 and not only not retired or in an internment camp, but I’m actually doing pretty well. I have a weekly column on a popular site called NewNowNext.com, I get freelance offers (like this one), and I’m asked to appear on TV and in documentaries to give my opinions on various pop cultural topics through the years. What’s more, having produced four books, I’m often asked by agents and publishers to crank out some more. Shady Pines is not beckoning me in the least — but I wish I’d have anticipated that fact, not only as a kid, but in my late 20s, when I thought I had already peaked as a writer. Yes, I felt like a has-been at 28!
Read more…

A Wealth of Perspective for a Free Ride, Now and Again

Getty Images

Looking for more excellent perspectives on aging? Check out our Fine Lines series, edited by Sari Botton.

When Megan Kimble moved to Austin, Texas, she started to volunteer with Capital City Village, a nonprofit that allows people to age in their homes by connecting members with those that can do repairs and offer rides. Simply wanting to truly know her new city and its inhabitants a little better, Kimble discovered that spending time with those far older than her offered not only new friendships, but valuable perspective unavailable anywhere else at any price. Read the story at CityLab.

I’m trying to get to know Austin—to understand this city beyond its carefully curated twang and charm. And to do that, I’m looking beyond my immediate contemporaries.

I struggled to build a new community for myself in Austin. I drove in crushing traffic to eat tacos from trailers, sit on patios under twinkle lights, and stand in bars watching live music. But sometimes it felt like I was performing life in Austin instead of living it.

I imagine being on the flipside of my life. If, at 32, I have just finished the first third of my life, what will it feel like when I am beginning the last third? I like talking to people whose major life decisions have already happened—who they’ll marry, whether or not to have kids, where they’ll live, what they’ll do there. Over the months, as I become un-partnered and start “doing the computer dating,” spending time with these more seasoned humans offers a perspective that is grounding, calming. The decisions that feel so fraught now will be remembered differently in 30 years. They remind me to take myself less seriously—to relish rather than fear all that I still don’t know.

Read the story

Exile, Compounded

The 77-meter (250-foot) Baris cargo towed by a Greek Navy Frigate, as a man looks on from the coastal Cretan port of Ierapetra, Greece, on Thursday, Nov. 27, 2014. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Masood Hotak was displaced for the first time when he left Afghanistan, trying to reach Europe, then displaced for a second time when he disappeared from the ranks of migrants and smugglers en route. His brother Javed mounted a multi-year, multi-country effort to track him down, to no avail. For Harper’s, Matthew Wolfe accompanied Javed during his search to tell the story of the profundity of this disappearance.

In the midst of this unprecedented wave of dislocation, thousands of migrants disappear every year. These disappearances are a function, largely, of the imperatives of secret travel. Lacking official permission to cross borders, “irregular migrants” are compelled to move covertly, avoiding the gaze of the state. In transit, they enter what the anthropologist Susan Bibler Coutin has called “spaces of nonexistence.” Barred from formal routes, some of them are pushed onto more hazardous paths—traversing deserts on foot or navigating rough seas with inflatable rafts. Others assume false identities, using forged or borrowed documents. In either case, aspects of the migrant’s identity are erased or deformed.

This invisibility cuts both ways. Even as it allows an endangered group to remain undetected, it renders them susceptible to new kinds of abuse. De facto stateless, they lack a government’s protection from exploitation by smugglers and unscrupulous authorities alike. Seeking safe harbor, many instead end up incarcerated, hospitalized, ransomed, stranded, or sold into servitude. In Europe, there is no comprehensive system in place to trace the missing or identify the dead. Already living in the shadows, migrants who go missing become, in the words of Jenny Edkins, a politics professor at the University of Manchester, “double disappeared.”

Taken as a whole, their plight constitutes an immense, mostly hidden catastrophe. The families of these migrants are left to mount searches—alone and with minimal resources—of staggering scope and complexity. They must attempt to defy the entropy of a progressively more disordered world—seeking, against long odds, to sew together what has been ripped apart.

Read the story

‘Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body’ and Other Lies I’ve Been Told: A Reading List on Mental Health and Sport

Getty Images

Over two miles into my first Division I cross country race, I felt buoyant. My legs turned over like a well-oiled machine and my chest fluttered with promise: as a freshman, I was in third place for my team. I dug the metal teeth of my spikes into dirt and focused on maintaining an even clip. Lost in the reverie of the race, I almost didn’t see my coach standing on the sideline, her blond hair pulled back, face shadowed in a hat.

“Get your shit together,” she seethed as I ran past. Focused and faster than anyone anticipated, I glanced over at her, unsure whether she was speaking to me or someone else. But I was alone. “Move your fucking ass.”

The feeling of calm in my chest dissipated with her words, as if a balloon had been pricked, all the air let loose. Rather than ruminating on the strength in my legs, the smooth swish of my uniform against inner arm, my mind reeled. What was I doing wrong? I was already on pace for a significant personal record — was I supposed to be running faster? Had I appeared unfocused as I ran past?

When I look back at that first race, I always remember those words, the way the tension crept into my limbs. And the feeling stayed throughout the season. Nothing ever seemed good enough for Coach — she’d tell us we were a fucking shit show as a team when we didn’t run as fast as anticipated or when our outfits didn’t match or when we took too long on warmup. Before a race, we could either be a fucking hero and get our shit together or not. There was no in-between. I was 17 years old at the time, adjusting to life halfway across the country from my family, new food, a new sleep schedule, higher mileage, and learning the contours of socializing with my team, but those were not factored into my performance, nor was there any acknowledgment that adjusting to college — especially as a Division I athlete — can be a difficult, and stress-inducing situation.

My coach’s words were not unfamiliar to me. As an athlete, I’d been told iterations of get your shit together my entire career. In high school, no matter what our emotional state was, we were trained to say every day is a great day! The phrase, one my coach used to yell into the sunrise while he biked next to me, is scrawled all over the margins of my training journals, even when the descriptions of my runs read “hurt a lot,” “windy,” or “bloody toe.” Shirts at cross country meets featured sayings like pain is weakness leaving the body; champions train, losers complain; and seven days without running makes one weak. These slogans, intended to be humorous in some cases, emphasized the mentality that many sports do: athletes should be tough enough to overcome anything. If you don’t, it means you’re weak.

I internalized that way of thinking while growing up. I’ve been competitive as an athlete since I was in third grade, and I learned to ignore my emotions, focusing instead on external measures of time, pace, and mileage. My strategy earned me respect from coaches as someone who would train through anything — sickness, shin splints, a bone that grew threw my big toe — and place well in races, no matter what was happening in my personal life. When I placed well, I told myself I was satisfied. And when I didn’t, my entire sense of self-worth came tumbling down. I’d vow to work harder in practice, and the whole cycle would repeat itself ad nauseam; I was always chasing an invisible goal that remained just out of reach.

Midway through my freshman year, I began experiencing neurological issues. As I’d learned to do throughout my years of training, I tried running through the symptoms. Even when this ended in me collapsing on the track, I’d try and try again. To quit seemed unthinkable, but eventually I did. I experienced an acute bout of depression. Without running, who was I? Why hadn’t I been strong enough to push through? I berated myself for being weak, for symptoms out of my control, for losing a sport that had been my entire identity.

Eight years have passed since then, and I am finally learning to run in a way that honors both my physical and emotional health. I am growing more comfortable talking about my experiences with depression, and the way that running played a role in my self-worth for such a long period of time. In speaking about it, I have also realized that I’m not alone. Many athletes struggle with mental health issues, but the culture of sport — especially at the top tiers of competition — often emphasizes physical performance over holistic wellbeing. The culture is changing in ways, yes, but the rhetoric of athlete’s “overcoming” anything is still deeply ingrained in the language of coaches, and the way athletes speak to themselves.

In the following essays, athletes testify on their experiences with mental illness, factors that exacerbate mental illness in sport, and ways that we as a culture can begin to change our language and training in an attempt to support wellness emotionally as well as physically.

1. When athletes share their battles with mental illness (Scott Gleeson and Erik Brady, August 30, 2017, USA Today)

As Scott Gleeson and Erik Brady report, nearly one in five Americans experience some form of mental illness and, for athletes, because of the stressors of the sport, experiences with injuries, and overtraining, the percentage may be even higher. Testimony from a range of athletes — Michael Phelps, Jerry West, Brandon Marshall, Allison Schmitt, among others — about their experiences with mental illness and sport are featured in this piece, all of them urging athletes to speak up about their experiences, seek professional help, and change the culture of sport for the better.

“Sometimes, I walk in a room and regret being so naked and vulnerable, but this is bigger than me,” Imani Boyette says. “I believe my purpose is to talk about the things that people are uncomfortable or afraid to talk about.”

2. Everyone Is Going Through Something (Kevin Love, March 6, 2018, The Players’ Tribune)

On November 5th, at a home basketball game against the Hawks, 29-year-old Cleveland Cavalier Kevin Love began to experience what he now knows was a panic attack. In the days and weeks that followed, after medical testing and conversations with his team, he began to see a therapist, which is something he never envisioned himself doing, particularly because of his identity as a pro basketball player.

“Nobody talked about what they were struggling with on the inside. I remember thinking, What are my problems? I’m healthy. I play basketball for a living. What do I have to worry about? I’d never heard of any pro athlete talking about mental health, and I didn’t want to be the only one. I didn’t want to look weak. Honestly, I just didn’t think I needed it. It’s like the playbook said — figure it out on your own, like everyone else around me always had.”

In this candid and moving essay, Love breaks the silence surrounding mental health, particularly in regard to sport, and, as the title of his essay makes clear, recognizes that “everyone is going through something.”

3. U.S. Athletes Need Better Mental Health Care (Martin Fritz Huber, May 16, 2018, Outside)

After DeMar DeRozan of the Toronto Raptors tweeted about his depression and Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers penned a viral essay about his experience with panic attacks, the NBA, as Martin Fritz Huber reports, created a position for a director of mental health and wellness.

“I think that’s the biggest burden on American sport culture,” says Brent Walker, an executive board member with the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. “I’ve heard repeatedly from professional and elite athletes how they don’t want to admit having to having a weakness—mental [illness] being one of those.”

Huber breaks down how other countries approach mental health in relation to sport, and asks what it might take to adjust the current system in the U.S. so that athletes are supported.

4. No, Running Isn’t Always the Best Therapy (Erin Kelly, July 23, 2018, Runner’s World)

“Phrases like ‘Running is cheaper than therapy!’ and ‘I run because punching people is frowned upon,’ are routinely splashed on running-themed bumper stickers, social memes, and apparel, and reinforce the idea that running offers a healthy mental outlet.”

Though studies show that running has positive benefits on wellbeing and mood, Erin Kelly, in this well-researched personal essay, pushes back against the notion that running can cure everything. Instead, she advocates that athletes reflect on why they’re participating in sport, and seek therapy when needed in addition to logging miles.

Related Read: When a Stress Expert Battles Mental Illness (Brad Stulberg, March 7, 2018, Outside)

5. The WNBA Needs Liz Cambage, but She May Not Need It (Lindsay Gibbs, August 20, 2018, The Ringer)

As Lindsay Gibbs reports, toxic effects of systemic racism, unequal pay in the WNBA, and a string of losses left Australian Liz Cambage, who plays for the WNBA’s Dallas Wings, depressed.

“When she returned to Melbourne, Cambage ghosted almost everyone in her life and retreated into a world of depression and anxiety. She said she heavily self-medicated with prescription pills and alcohol. She said that she isn’t surprised by her on-court success this season.”

Cambage credits honesty — with herself and others — as the reason she’s emerged from the dark place where she was.

6. Split Image (Kate Fagan, May 7, 2015, ESPN)

Social media allows us to curate images that tell a certain narrative — one that’s not always the most honest. As Kate Fagan reports, Madison Holleran, formerly a runner at Penn, seemed like she had the perfect life based on her Instagram and texts.

“But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly. She was a deep thinker, someone who was aware of the image she presented to the world, and someone who often struggled with what that image conveyed about her, with how people superficially read who she was, what her life was like.”

After Madison committed suicide, her family and friends scoured old posts and texts for clues about what was wrong and the warning signs they missed. Ultimately, this piece asks us to consider what lurks beneath the surface of social media’s veneer.

Related read: Are Female Long-Distance Runners More Prone to Suicidal Depression? (Emily De La Bruyere, February 3, 2014, The Daily Beast)

7. Talent. A Football Scholarship. Then Crushing Depression. (Kurt Streeter, November 15, 2018, The New York Times)

“What experts know is this: Recent studies place suicide as the third leading cause of death for college athletes, behind motor vehicle accidents and medical issues.

And nearly 25 percent of college athletes who participated in a widely touted 2016 study led by researchers at Drexel University displayed signs of depressive symptoms.”

In this profile of Isaiah Renfro, a top freshman wide receiver at the University of Washington who attempted suicide, Kurt Streeter writes about the pressures placed on NCAA athletes, what it means to quit sport after building an identity as a high-performing athlete, the important role that coaches play in supporting athletes off the field and on, and the hope that Renfro now feels for his life after seeking treatment.

8. Sports Stats May Be an Ideal Measure of Mental Health (B. David Zarley, October 17, 2016, The Atlantic)

At the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, associate professor Daniel Eisenberg is leading a team of researchers at Athletes Connected in order to help athletes understand mental-health problems and track concrete data on the subject. As B. David Zarley reports, Eisenberg and other researchers collect weekly mental-health surveys which focus on academic and athletic performances and levels of anxiety and depression in order to pinpoint connections between the two.

“I think sports and celebrity are two places where we can begin to lift the mental-health stigma, by showing that real people who perform, and who are well valued by society through their athletic contributions, do also suffer from symptoms of ill mental health,” says Chris Gibbons, a post-doctoral fellow and the director of health assessment and innovation at the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre.”

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about neurological illness and running. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

‘I Knew It Was Not My Correct Life, Because It Asked Me To Mute My Voice.’

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (4,177 words)

 

I first stumbled across Reema Zaman on Facebook where each week she posts Love Letter Monday in which she discusses her life, both the hardships and successes, in an unabashedly self-loving manner. At first it caught me by surprise. I was so unaccustomed to hearing a woman speak well of herself — it felt, well, wrong. But soon enough I found myself sneaking back as if the words were contraband and the act of reading them a necessary revolution. The posts also contain an outpouring of love for the reader. A clarion call for women to turn “wound into wisdom” and “pain into poetry.” To be the authors of their own lives.

Her new memoir I Am Yours continues the call. In an evolving age-specific voice, Reema guides the reader through her life from a childhood in Bangladesh and Thailand with a domineering and unpredictable father, through anorexia and rape while living with roommates in Manhattan and navigating an often degrading and even dangerous life as an actress and model, to emotional abuse while living in a dilapidated barn in the middle of no-cell-phone-service woods with her then husband until, at age thirty, she at last lands a room of her own.

Reema’s prose is as ablaze as her heart. Lyrical, precise, in places frothing with desire or rage or faith, Reema’s unbridling of her tightly-watched self-suppressed voice is not an easy task. Yet it’s an essential one. These are hard stories, let loose at last with grace, sagacity, and dollops of clever humor. At its heart, I Am Yours is a story of hope. Read more…

What Gwyneth Paltrow and Great Expectations Taught Me about the Male Gaze

Illustration by Wenjia Tang

Sara Petersen | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (4,273 words)

I was 17 when I watched Gwyneth Paltrow bend her knee gently toward Ethan Hawke’s stooped figure in Alfonso Cuaron’s 1998 film adaptation of Great Expectations. In the gloom of a suburban Massachusetts movie theatre, I watched, my body stiff, my fingers gripping the red plush seat, as Hawke’s hand moved slowly up her leg. I watched as Paltrow’s lovely head tilted back in pleasure. I had never been kissed and I wasn’t entirely sure what Hawke’s hand was doing beneath the layers of Paltrow’s mint-green tulle prom dress, but that seemed beside the point. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her face. Her face, which seemed to exist only to be seen.

In the film, the kneecap scene begins with Estella discovering Finn’s portrait of her hanging on his bedroom wall. She stares at the painting with dispassionate eyes before turning and saying to him, “I don’t wear my hair like that anymore.”

“You should,” he replies.

“Do you like it that way?” Her voice purrs and a ghost of a smile twitches at the corners of her lips. It’s clear she is turned on by looking at herself through his eyes.

“What else do you like?” she asks, as she moves closer to his seated form before sliding her golden leg toward him.

As his hand moves toward her white cotton underwear, her lips part with what must be ecstasy; the angular planes of her face glow. The scene ends with Estella leaning down toward Finn in a gesture of kindness which seems to cost her nothing. She offers her mouth to Finn’s, which is hanging open with stupid, raw desire. Just as he relaxes into the realization that his fantasy is becoming real, just as he moves more confidently toward her and reaches for the ends of her brittle blond hair, Estella suddenly stands up, her body iron-straight and leaves the room. Her eyes are calm and cold and she is in complete control.

***

At 17, I had fresh-bud boobs, a little-girl tummy, and hard bumps of cystic acne dotting my chin. I had participated in the pageantry of “going out with” a few boys, and I was just beginning to discover what it meant to feel wanted, just beginning to confuse being wanted with having power. My boyfriend-in-name-only gave me a grubby hemp necklace festooned with a soon-to-tarnish silver sun, and after watching Great Expectations, I spent countless hours in bed, fingering the rays of that little sun, wondering if he saw me as golden, as light, as beautiful. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Estella came along at just the right — or ultimately wrong — time in my development.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Watching Estella use her body to gain control made me curious about desire, made me think about the male gaze before I knew what the male gaze was. Estella enchanted me with her stony perfection, her utter lack of awkwardness or apology, her total command of her audience. I never wondered what she wanted, which of course, was entirely the point. For me, at gangly and insecure 17, Estella was the pinnacle, the holy grail of what any woman might ever hope to be: a gorgeous object of desire.

In her 1998 review of Great Expectations for the New York Times, Janet Maslin writes, “Ms. Paltrow does turn herself into the elegant object of desire that the story requires. Her presence is as coolly striking as her role (in Mitch Glazer’s screenplay) is underwritten. Incidentally, this is one more film in which the heroine’s posing nude for an artist is supposed to make her more fully defined.” At 17, I didn’t read the New York Times, and even if I had, I think Maslin’s critique would only have fanned the flames of my craving to be seen as worth seeing. In high school, it’s every awkward girl’s dream to be thought of as “coolly striking.”

When I recall the movie scenes that lodged themselves into my still pliable, tender subconscious, it’s the kneecap scene first and foremost. But there’s also the penultimate scene in which Finn paints naked Estella in a frenzy of both erotic and artistic ecstasy. She takes off her clothes before uttering her first and final line in the scene: “So do you want me sitting or standing?”

The rest of the scene consists of her languidly moving throughout a New York City loft as Finn frenetically splashes paint across countless canvases, so entranced is he by the glory of Estella’s flesh. And of course, like any good movie that fetishizes unhealthy attachments, there’s the kissing-in-the-rain scene. In other words, the scenes that mattered to me were the scenes in which Estella is devoid of any active purpose or agency; the scenes that mattered were the scenes in which Estella passively submitted to Finn’s desperate eyes.

Maybe it was Finn’s desperation (and, transmuted through the male gaze through which I viewed Estella), my own, that muddled me into imagining Estella the central focus of the film. I didn’t know that Finn is supposed to be the subject of Great Expectations. Feminism existed only as a sterile word in a paragraph about suffragettes in my history textbook and I did not have the tools to view Estella as what she is: an empty shell crafted for male consumption, even demonized as a femme fatale. I did not know that there were limited roles for women — domestic goddess or dangerous sexual minx, or perhaps worst of all, pitiful spinster — and that Estella represented not rosy possibility but a narrow and reductive scope of female representation. Anne Bancroft’s Miss Dinsmoor (Miss Havisham in the novel) tried to show me what happened when a woman defied patriarchal norms, but I was too enthralled by the shiny object of Estella that I didn’t pay attention. Grotesque in clownish makeup and abject in her heartbreak, I saw Miss Dinsmoor through the male gaze, and by that I mean, I saw her as disgusting, a wreck of thwarted desire I longed to look away from.

I did not know that there were limited roles for women — domestic goddess or dangerous sexual minx, or perhaps worst of all, pitiful spinster — and that Estella represented not rosy possibility but a narrow and reductive scope of female representation.

I relegated Miss Dinsmoor to the back of my mind where she belonged, and focused my ambitions on becoming an “elegant object of desire.” Estella never seemed flustered, upset, or awkward, her role as object seemed peaceful and complete. Maybe if I could define myself through and for someone else’s eyes, a man’s eyes, I wouldn’t have to do the work of defining myself for myself.

***

At college in Boston, my breasts became more than buds, and I began dressing to showcase that fact, tagging along with girlfriends to stores in Downtown Crossing to buy all-important “clubbing clothes.” In my case, this meant a pair of boot-cut pleather pants and a triangle top in flimsy polyester zebra print. I wore my new clothes with a combination of curiosity and entirely feigned confidence until it became clear that boys were starting to look.

I watched boys watch me, and the hunger etched into Ethan Hawke’s face flashed across my brain. At frat parties in Allston, or in the bottom bunk of extra-long twins, I became intoxicated by the reflection of myself I had become increasingly adept at invoking in boys’ eyes. I would stand tall and hold my head high on my neck and envision Paltrow’s knee moving slowly toward Hawke’s open hand. I would remember the delicate hooks of her collarbones. Estella doesn’t seem to want anything from Finn. From anyone. In a critical piece about the male gaze in both the novel and the film adaptation, Michael K. Johnson writes, “Pip [or Finn] is blind to any desire on Estella’s part, for if Estella desires, she begins to emerge as a subject rather than an object, and thereby would destabilize Pip’s construction of himself as the hero of his romantic quest.” I thought the not caring and not wanting was the magic that locked people in, allowed a person to bask in the warmth of being seen as something the seer wants. I didn’t imagine Estella’s lack of desire meant that she could never flourish as anything more than a foil to a man’s story.

I finally read Great Expectations around the time I met the perfect test subject for my performance of Estella cool — a boy in a band. By then, I had so internalized Paltrow’s slight underbite, her weightless body, her chilly power, that it was difficult to imagine Estella in heavy petticoats. Miss Havisham’s death by flaming bridal dress failed to make an impression.

The boy in the band scorned me as being a dumb blond at our first meeting (I called him aloof, to which he responded, “I’m surprised you even know what that means”), and his slouchy disinterest was the ultimate aphrodisiac. The first time we slept together, he told me he was in way over his head, and I thought about Finn’s bottomless desire for Estella. The more I projected Estella onto my face, my body, the more the boy in the band wanted me. He hovered his body over mine, and I thought about Paltrow’s lifted chin as she pushes Hawke’s hand between her legs.

The boy in the band fucked me with an urgency that made me dizzy, made me forget the inner trapping of my mind, made me exist only within my body. The force of his desire was all I wanted, needed. His desire was enough for us both — his desire fueled mine. Being wanted like that made everything simple, made my insecurities melt away, made my doubts about myself and what I wanted from life drift into the ether. His desire for my body filled me to the brim, leaving no room for anything else, and that feeling — of being enough because of being wanted — that feeling was calm, was rest. It felt like power.

I never orgasmed with him, but when I was alone in the dark, I pictured myself through his eyes and did.

Maybe if I could define myself through and for someone else’s eyes, a man’s eyes, I wouldn’t have to do the work of defining myself for myself.

When the boy in the band teetered toward indifference, I conjured Estella, thought of her hard icy heart, which was so desirable, so beautiful, and I worked harder on freezing my own soft, warm places. When he didn’t call me, I didn’t call him to complain. I made plans with girlfriends and drank too much until he finally did. When I could no longer locate the image of me reflected in his eyes — the me as he wanted me — I withdrew until the image returned. When we went out together, I collected the stares of other men and boys as if they were a currency I could use to pay my way into the band boy’s heart. When I did these things, I saw that my instincts were right. His desire returned and it filled me up. I told myself we were in love, remembering how Finn and Estella made love look like pain. I remembered their tortured kiss in the rain and committed to making a success of star-crossed love because surely difficult endeavors were worth pursuing. The boy in the band never painted a picture of me like Finn did for Estella, but I vowed to keep us together until he wrote a song instead.

It was all perfect until I made the mistake of thinking maybe the boy in the band wanted the real me, not the veneer I had worked so hard to create. It was perfect until the person who wanted things, needed things — the person that was me — reared her ugly head and scared him off.

I started to ask for things. Things like dinner, double dates with friends, cozy sleepovers planned in advance. Too much. Most of the time, I subsumed my desires to be alone with him and forced myself to be easy, cool, to go with his flow, despite the fact that I was not truly a chill person, that I hated not knowing where I would sleep on a given night. I paid too much for blond highlights that made me look like I had been out in the sun, because the version of me he liked was naturally beautiful without trying. I would sit in the corner of his apartment wearing a mustard-colored vintage sweater because I thought it made me look bohemian, watching him watch a movie I didn’t want to watch with his best friend and bandmate, and the more they enjoyed the movie, the more they enjoyed each other, the more I hated him, his friend, and their easy comradery. The more I hated myself for failing to keep him interested in me.

I went to great lengths to hold his attention. The summer of my 23rd year, I traveled to Vermont to play a coquettish 1940s secretary at a summer stock theatre. When the show closed, a girlfriend and I snuck into the women’s dressing room, where I donned my Marilyn Monroe platinum wig and stripped down to fishnets and a black bra. Steph snapped photos of me, making sure they were optimally sexy. When I developed the black-and-white disposable-camera film, I analyzed each photo carefully, before selecting the ones in which I looked most assured of whoever it was I was pretending to be and pasted them into one of those artsy books girls in their twenties make for their boyfriends who are in bands. Cleverly, I thought, I developed a narrative to accompany the photos. Alongside a photo of me perched above an ironing board, cold iron in hand, my ass jutting out against my black American Eagle underwear, I wrote, “She can be clean.” Alongside a photo of me peering over my shoulder with empty eyes and faux nonchalance, a la Estella, I wrote, “She can be cold.” And alongside a photo of me sitting on the floor cross-legged, my boobs out and slightly saggy, the perky wig tossed to the side, I wrote, “She can be yours.” This last photo felt like a risk, felt like honesty. It was a photo of the me I wanted him to want.

It’s not that these tricks failed to ignite his desire, it’s that I became increasingly resentful of the need to conjure tricks at all. The longer we were together, the harder it was for me to be someone else, and the more I resented him for finding that someone else more appealing than me. As much as I tried to remember the power of Estella, my frosty mask started to itch. The injustice of the whole venture began to preoccupy me. I had groomed my body according to his desires; molded my tastes, my attitude, my clothing to what I thought were his wants. I had done everything Estella taught me would work. But it wasn’t working. There was a flaw in the equation, and I had no choice but to assume the flaw was me. I thought something about the authentic me must’ve been marring my performance. Something about me wasn’t enough. My suppressed desire to be wanted as myself started to turn the real me into something dangerously near combustion.

Miss Havisham died wearing a flaming wedding dress. She died in a blaze of frustrated desire and unrealized potential.

On a raw, drizzly night in November, he texted saying he was in the middle of a jam session and couldn’t make it to my apartment. He was supposed to sleep over, fuck me, then hold me. When I couldn’t make him come to me, something fell apart inside, and it was with equal parts relief and horror, that my whole explosive self came screaming to the surface. Banging my palms against the glossy white of the painted bricks in the tiny Beacon Hill bedroom I shared with my sister, I shrieked and felt validated when my vocal chords felt like they were choking me. I craved that sense of stillness that only his body wanting mine could give me. Without it, I felt empty, felt missing. I think now I had allowed his desire to sweep away the rest of me, so when the desire disappeared, so did I. Unmoored.

Everything was perfect until my pesky subjecthood tried to claw its way free from objectification.

My inability to make him do what I wanted in this one small moment brought the reality of my failure crashing home. I had spent countless months putting all my energy into cultivating what I thought was power only to find it was ultimately meaningless, that my “power” had only ever been submission, that desire could only be fleeting, and this realization shook me to the core. I knew I wasn’t a true Estella, but I had lived for so long in her skin, I still wasn’t clear who the real me was. I just knew she was angry, I just knew she wanted to be seen. Because without someone looking, I felt invisible.

Behind the tears, behind the desperation, I probably imagined a camera documenting the whole thing.

My sister didn’t know what to do with me, so she called my parents, who threatened to call an ambulance if I didn’t stop saying I wanted to hurt myself. Which I did want. Not seriously, but just enough for my external pain to match my internal pain. The blissfully unyielding white walls of the Beacon Hill apartment bruised my knuckles and substantiated the howling void inside of me. The pain made me feel grounded.

The boy in the band broke up with me soon after, and a therapist prescribed me something akin to horse tranquilizers should I find myself gripped by another panic attack, which is what the therapist called the flood of feeling that had deluged me on that chilly November night. The pills came in handy once the boy in the band took me back.

Feminist scholar Hilary Schor says this about Great Expectations: “Pip’s authorship is so strong as to make Estella’s story almost disappear, to make Estella almost disappear.” For me, watching Great Expectations at 17 did more than that, it halted a burgeoning self from appearing in the first place.

The irony is no longer lost on me that I spent the remainder of my twenties as a struggling actor determined to be seen without fully knowing or even asking myself what it was I wanted to be seen as or for. I continued to seek validation from men and eventually stumbled across a guy who wasn’t in a band, a guy who wanted to move in together and get a puppy. It was the first relationship in which I felt comfortable to be my ugliest, most basic self. I felt no compunction about wearing a shapeless pair of flannel PJ pants I’d had since high school around him, and this committed relationship felt so good, so restful, so much easier than waiting in open-call lines, so much easier than sending out another slew of headshots, so much easier than asking myself if I really even wanted to be an actress in the first place, and this sense of ease made me think that I had finally figured out what I wanted. I wanted to get married and have kids.

After struggling for so long to find myself, I was relieved that motherhood had found me.

As a mother, I would no longer need to worry about being sexually desirable, about being who someone else wanted me to be, about being “successful.” My nagging fear of purposelessness would disappear, the repressed anxiety that whispered about lack of motivation or ambition or direction would cease interrupting my sleep. I could be earnest and boring and comfortable. I could devote myself fully to a new life, an endeavor so worthy that it couldn’t fail to fill me with joy and satisfaction. As a mother, I wouldn’t need to schmooze or hone my craft or have any craft at all. I would just need to love and be loved. Most importantly, I would care so much about this new little person, that I could stop worrying about myself.

So it was with a heartbreaking sort of recklessness and desperation that I threw myself into wifehood and motherhood as the conclusive panacea to a lack of self-knowledge.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that motherhood did not provide a smooth path to selfhood, but rather made me seriously engage with the work of finding myself for the first time. My body, which used to feel like a magical vessel with which I could choose my own adventure, was stripped down to its most grimly physiological purpose. And the new baby, whose desire for me was insatiable, didn’t care if I was cool, didn’t care if my pores were big or small, didn’t care about me at all, the real me or otherwise.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that motherhood did not provide a smooth path to selfhood, but rather made me seriously engage with the work of finding myself for the first time.

Estella had taught me that to be wanted was everything, and being wanted had gotten me a husband, which had, in turn gotten me a baby. Of course, I had deliberately sought these things for myself, but while cluster feeding my newborn throughout the night, tears moved silently down my face, I felt like this life had been done to me. So blindly had I ridden the roller coaster of objectification, I forgot to ever ask myself, “What do you want?”

I spent the days following my first child’s birth waiting in vain to feel an overwhelming sense of rightness. I held him against me and waited for some sort of feeling that this was always what I wanted, always what I was meant to do, to descend upon me and quiet the voices within that kept persisting in wanting, wanting, wanting. I wiped away spit-up, ran the dishwasher, sat in a circle of smiling adults singing songs about animals, and ached with loneliness. I came to realize that motherhood can never fill an empty person up. On the contrary, motherhood can sweep an empty person away entirely.

Motherhood taught me about feminism with a force that took my breath away, and the ramshackle self I had cobbled together through the eyes of others came tumbling down in the darkness of postpartum depression. I’ve since read and thought a lot about postpartum depression, and while of course, women undergo vast physical and hormonal changes following the creation and birth of a human being that impact their mental health, I have some of my own theories about why some of us are more prone to that particular blackness than others.

Historically, the world has not cared about what women want. The world has only very recently offered this question to women. The world has only very recently thought to ask women whether or not they want marriage. Children. And even though the questions have slowly started to seep into some girls’ lives, many other girls, myself included, were (and still are) raised breathing the air of a male world, a world in which women’s most valuable currency is her ability to be what a man wants, is her ability to starve her own selfhood for the sake of someone else’s.

Historically, the world has not cared about what women want. The world has only very recently offered this question to women.

And for me, motherhood, was the culmination of disillusionment. Especially at the beginning, motherhood takes, takes, takes. And if the new mother’s foundation is a simulacrum, the baby soon takes so much that nothing much is left. To enter into motherhood, a job defined by self-sacrifice, without a strong sense of self in place, is a dangerous venture. Postpartum depression was a brutal teacher who made me realize that figuring out who I was and what I wanted was no longer a luxury, it was critical to me putting one foot in front of the other.

***

After hours of nonsleep, the sun glared through my curtains, and I peeled myself from the breast milk–soaked sheets and limped to the bathroom, where I confronted the mirror. There was no one else left to look at me, no one else that could make me feel seen. I would have to look at myself. My face was gaunt, my skin wan, my eyes heavily shadowed in a shade of exhausted purple, and I saw an abject figure looking back at me. I remembered Miss Havisham.

At 37, I still occasionally think of Paltrow’s slender kneecap emerging from the folds of mint tulle when I enter a dark bar and scan the male faces. Old habits.

After hours of nonsleep, the sun glared through my curtains, and I peeled myself from the breast milk–soaked sheets and limped to the bathroom, where I confronted the mirror. There was no one else left to look at me, no one else that could make me feel seen. I would have to look at myself.

I think of another moment more often — a moment I’ve never seen — the moment after Estella leaves the room. Does she even exist? At 17, I didn’t wonder about Estella’s desires. I do now.

Estella was never asked what she wanted. Miss Havisham raised her to break hearts, to wreak revenge for Miss Havisham’s own broken heart. And lest we judge Miss Havisham too harshly, she had every reason to suppose that living a life free from personal desire would be less tortuous for a woman than risking making one’s true desires known. Miss Havisham desired love from a man; she wanted a man’s love to complete her, and when that didn’t happen, she didn’t know how to complete herself.

And what do I want? I want to have been asked the question in the first place. And I want to use my bitterly earned knowledge to ensure my own daughter knows that asking herself that question should always be her first priority. I want to live the rest of my life giving voice to my anger that she still lives in a world in which she must prioritize her desires, because there’s no guarantee anyone else will. I want to live each day as a continued effort to listen to myself, to fill myself up.

***

Sara’s essays about feminism, motherhood, and the performance of femininity have appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Ploughshares, Vox, The Lily, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She’s working on a collection.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel

Copy editor: Jacob Gross