The Longreads Blog

5 Questions for Kristi Coulter About Writing, Humor, and Getting Sober

Photo by: Moritz Vennemann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

In the opening piece of her new memoir-in-essays Nothing Good Can Come from This, Kristi Coulter meanders through a Whole Foods stocked with displays of rosé and reckons with the demands of her new sobriety. The scene embodies the difficult journey she’s started. Alcohol is everywhere; on billboards, on ice cream, on coworkers’ desks, Worse yet, work meetings frequently involve drinks. Coulter finds ways to not only quit drinking, but to survive as a woman in a misogynistic culture soaked with booze, a culture where, as she describes it, “There’s no easy way to be a woman, because, as you may have noticed, there’s no acceptable way to be a woman. And if there’s no acceptable way to be the thing you are, then maybe some women drink a little. Or a lot.”

An erudite, reflective writer with a winning sense of humor, Coulter’s explorations move beyond drinking to examine feminism, sexism, privilege, happiness, and work. Many readers will see themselves in her, and the book will let those who have never had a substance abuse problem come to better understand friends and family who do—and maybe see the levity in the darker side of life.

When did you start writing about your life and recovery? And how was your experience of that initial process?

I started writing about my life and my recovery via a blog, Off-Dry, that I created in 2013 when I was about 60 days sober. At the time, my impulse wasn’t about writing so much as it was about being part of a community. There’s a vibrant sober blogosphere, and in those early days, I spent at least an hour a night reading posts from people who were far enough along in their sobriety to serve as a lantern for me. I wanted to start recording my own experience, both to process it and to help the newly sober. When I started the blog, I hadn’t written for the sake of writing (much less for art’s sake) in well over a decade. I’d gotten my MFA at 24, and when I had failed to magically become world-famous by 30, I sulkily turned my attention to other forms of achievement. It didn’t take long before I found myself using the blog not just as a way to test out my voice as a sober person, but to shape and experiment with my writing voice, too. I started writing fiction again at about six months sober, and once I’d come out publicly as sober on my second anniversary, I began writing the personal essays that ultimately led to Nothing Good Can Come From This.

What was it that moved you to switch from writing fiction to personal essays? Did coming out publically help you locate both your voice and material?

I think coming out publicly did help me to realize I’d stumbled onto some pretty rich material, yes. As I started to experiment with writing about sobriety — and the topics that float around it, like feminism and pleasure and willingness to live in permanent ambiguity — I found a voice emerging that was more direct and acerbic and edgy than either my fictional voice or my real-life one. Exercising that blunt voice worked for the topic — a lot of recovery writing is pretty earnest — and I wanted room to be funny and irreverent. It also somehow made me a happier, bolder person. Fiction writing is still important to me, but for now, I’m very glad my essay voice and I found each other.

What other essayists have influenced you?

So many! I read Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext in college and was taken by how matter-of-factly she wrote about her body and mental illness and sex. I was nowhere near ready to broach those kinds of subjects myself, but the permission I took from reading her stayed with me. I read David Sedaris for his mastery of tone, particularly the way he can have you giggling out loud and then just stick a knife in you. I read Claire Dederer’s Love and Trouble, which is a memoir but also a collection of essays, and it directly influenced how I approached topics of marriage and sex. Also, I don’t know if they are essayists per se, but I’m intensely interested in the work of writers like Sarah Manguso and Maggie Nelson, who write short, densely packed, aphoristic pieces that live somewhere between essay, prose poem, and memoir.

Between Roxane Gay, Megan Stielstra, Scaachi Koul, Angela Morales, Michelle Orange, Martha Grover, Alice Bolin and Meaghan O’Connell, we live in a golden age of female essayists. Many more commercial presses are publishing women’s essays, but book publishing is still a tough business. What was your experience like getting this book published in today’s market?

My publishing experience was pretty oddball. I had won a few prizes and published some short stories in literary quarterlies in the late 1990s, but my trail stopped there, e.g. I was basically a complete unknown as of 2016. What happened is that I self-published a version of “Girl Skulks Into a Room,” one of the essays in the book, on Medium, and it went very mildly viral. Daphne Durham, a former co-worker who had since become a literary agent, texted me even before she’d read the whole thing: “There’s a book in this.” I thought the notion of me writing a whole book about anything was wildly optimistic, but over a few coffee dates Daphne helped me to see what she saw, and we started working together on a book proposal. Daphne was an absolutely fantastic editor for my work, and in the process of editing me, she realized how much she enjoyed editing. So as we were getting close to having something ready to shop, she accepted an Executive Editor role at MCD/FSG, and after some time she and Sean McDonald spent working through their vision for the imprint, she ended up acquiring my book.

In the interim, another essay I self-published on Medium, “Enjoli,” went hugely viral, and that brought a lot of agent and editor attention my way. It was a life-changing experience. But when it came to finding a home for the book, I didn’t feel a need to play a bunch of angles to maximize that one moment. I knew I wanted to be with an influential but smaller house like FSG, where a debut author wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle, and where they would have an eye on my long-term potential. And I already knew I loved working with Daphne. So it was pretty much a no-brainer to go with FSG. The day I got the offer, I pulled a bunch of FSG books off my shelves — Joan Didion, Frederick Seidel, Ben Lerner, Laura van den Berg ─ and stacked them on my coffee table and just stared at them going “Holy fuck.” And two years later I’m still largely in that “holy fuck” place. So my experience was a bit of a fairy tale. I know how hard it is for even very good work to get recognized in this business, and that it’s on me to take a fairy-tale start and turn it into a sustainable career.

Joan Didion famously said, “Writers are always selling somebody out.” How have loved ones reacted to your book so far?

An advantage of having “Enjoli” go viral is that there are now strangers on literally every continent who have now read or heard me talk about drinking and sobriety. That’s fantastic desensitization therapy. I feel as matter-of-fact about that part of my life now as I do about having brown hair or growing up in Florida. And I’ve also heard countless addiction stories from other people in the last few years, so addiction feels very normal to me now, probably more standard than it actually is. I could hang out and chat about addiction with friends, family, or Dick Cheney (why did he come to mind? I don’t know) all day.

It’s the Other Stuff — about sex, adultery, being kind of a selfish jackass sometimes — that gives me palpitations. My husband, the only person whose permission I sought to tell some of these stories, is fully on board. He’s so on board that he has threatened to have the book cover airbrushed onto the side of his surf van, and to wear a t-shirt with “John” (in quotes) on it to events just so he gets full credit. Friends have also responded with astonishing enthusiasm and acceptance, even nonchalance. I’m only slightly disturbed that people don’t seem to find any of the revelations very surprising. My parents have yet to read the book, and I’ve actually requested they not, because I just don’t think anyone needs to know some of this stuff about their kid. (I was inspired to make that request by hearing Roxane Gay say she’d asked her parents not to read Hunger. “I didn’t know I could DO that!” I thought.) They might still choose to read it, but I’ve let them know I’m not available to process it with them from a content perspective. I’m not going to use the book as a vehicle to relitigate past history. (Same goes for ex-boyfriends, in case any are reading this!) The book is a memoir, yes, but both memoirs and their narrators are constructs. What readers are getting is one truthful view into my life, not a diary.

Your book is deeply reflective and probing, but it’s also hilarious. I laughed countless times, frequently in public. Can you talk about your ideas about the role of humor in personal nonfiction or literature in general?

I’m glad you found it funny! I’m fortunate to have a temperament that can find humor in nearly anything. When I first seriously contemplated getting sober, I had the misconception that it would require a depth of earnestness on my part that would crowd out humor, and that was not an appealing prospect. When I finally got unhappy enough to make the leap anyway, I quickly realized that getting and staying sober demanded seriousness of purpose, which is not the same thing as earnestness or reverence. In fact, I learned that if I couldn’t find humor in sobriety, I probably wouldn’t make it, because I’d be covering up my authentic self, not revealing it. So in writing this book I liked the idea of showing others that you can be dead serious about remaking your life without falling into groupthink or a cult of positivity. (Though I’ll add that, as Leslie Jamison discusses in The Recovering, groupthink can be very useful in its way, especially early on when it’s dawning on you that literally millions of people have been in your shoes and have things to teach you about finding new, better shoes.)

In terms of humor, in personal nonfiction or literature in general, there’s nothing more exhilarating than realizing an author finds the same weird things funny that you do. It’s a tiny but deep bonding moment, like when I meet someone who agrees with me that celery tastes like metal crossed with evil. But that humor has to be organic. I don’t use humor in my writing because I think it should be funny; I use humor because it’s one of my natural ways of coping with my own core desperation and terror and whatnot, so that comes through in my voice. Forced humor, which I can fall into as much as any writer, is just painful. I also think it’s important, at least in books, to be funny in a way that will age well. It’s one thing to make super timely, Shrek-type jokes about pop culture in a blog post or other ephemeral form, but a whole book full of one-liners about, like, This Is Us, or Scott Pruitt’s Ritz-Carlton hand lotion? That makes me feel tired now, and in five years it won’t even sound like English.

‘I’d Rather Import Water Than Export Children’

Moab, Utah
An unusally wet spring in the Desert Southwest. (George Rose / Getty Images)

In Outside MagazineMark Sundeen visits St. George, Utah, “the fastest-growing metropolitan area in America,” to report on the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline.

“The battle over the pipeline is a proxy for the debate on growth,” Sundeen writes. Some Utahns hope that the water project, which is projected to cost between $1.1 billion and $1.8 billion, will support a growing economy and provide the next generation with opportunities for local employment. Without enough water, pipeline advocates believe that the state’s investments in education and infrastructure will go to waste.

But local activists believe Utah’s urban centers should follow examples set by desert cities like Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and Tucson, which manage to conserve water while serving far larger populations. Continued growth may also create more environmental problems than economic solutions for the next generation, especially in cities where the landscape is already naturally inhospitable.

“There is no lack of water here,” Sundeen quotes author Edward Abbey, “unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”

It was easy to like Dean Cox and his tale of entrepreneurial grit. He welcomes the new growth. In the past, most local kids were forced to leave St. George—or Dixie, as it’s nicknamed—if they wanted a career. The area became a haven for retirees, the first wave arriving in the 1970s. One big achievement of this early boom, Cox told me, is the expanded new hospital. Instead of a handful of country doctors, they have a first-rate medical center with a roster of specialists. His daughter works there. “She wouldn’t be here—that job wouldn’t be here—” he said, “without the previous water projects.”

Old-timers like Cox say they have no right to shut the door behind them. He believes that the county needs the water for the next generation. “If we don’t have the pipeline, we don’t have the growth, and we can send our kids somewhere else,” he said.

Van Dam and Rutherford also dispute the line that growth makes the city more affordable for future generations. They showed me a report by a panel of university economists forecasting that, if the pipeline is built, it could raise water rates more than 500 percent. Eventually, Van Dam said, St. George will have to reckon with the fact that it’s living beyond its natural means. “They’ll keep building until you have more people here than God ever intended,” he said. “They are passing the hard decisions they should be making now onto their grandkids.”

Read the story

Appropriation in the Land of Enchantment

AP Photo/The New Mexican, Abel Uribe

New Mexico is one of the least populated states in the U.S., and it remains one of the most beautiful and culturally diverse. But thanks to a growing desert chic fueled by Coachella and Burning Man, newcomers are pouring into gentrifying Taos, treating Santa Fe as one giant spa getaway, and consuming Indigenous culture as something that can teach them to be more spiritually centered.

There are the neo-hippies, the crystal healing people, the Burners, the outdoorsy REI set. There are the fake urban shamans, the moneyed folks who love the museum gift shops more than the museum exhibits, and the young hip urbanites drawn to the desert as a kind of aspirational lifestyle. But sporting turquoise Navajo jewelry isn’t bringing any of them closer to the land.

For Jezebel, native New Mexican Anna Merlan writes about the tensions that this growing breed of visitors and new arrivals have elicited in the ancient Land of Enchantment. The state is having what Merlan calls a reckoning with its history, as Native communities vocally tackle the complexities of property rights, colonialism, and appropriation with marches and protests.

But why the Southwest? “People who came to New Mexico and Arizona were coming almost as a reaction to the urban environment,” explains Meredith Davidson, a historian based in Santa Fe and an expert on the counterculture movement in the region. “It was a way to get out of the Haight Ashbury or get out of these overpopulated areas and pursue this kind of, mythologized, sometimes true but definitely romanticized image of a back to the land utopia.”

And of course, she says, “A lot of that ‘back to the land’ utopia myth has to do with images of Native Americans.”

Davidson’s research has shown her two parallel movements. “There was a percentage of people coming out here, getting engaged with people like the Taos Pueblo elders, learning from them, participating in peyote meetings, learning to build adobe,” she explains, a group who were interested in learning while trying not to appropriate. And then, she says, “there are the people you’re thinking about who come out and appropriate this image of a Southwestern person: turquoise jewelry and peasant skirts and this and that. Those don’t seem to be the people who stayed and were engaged in making New Mexico what it is.”

Read the story

The Word ‘Hole’

Kydpl Kyodo / AP

Katharine Kilalea | An excerpt from the novel Ok, Mr. Field | Tim Duggan Books | July 2018 | 10 minutes (2,708 words)

The sun was shining brightly off the whiteness of the page before me when I opened the newspaper. It was hot. Watery noises rose from the tide pool where children were swimming. The silence was otherwise disturbed only by occasional shouts from their strident games mistress who, since the narrow windows encircling the courtyard hid the upper and lower reaches of the world from view, I could hear but not see.

My gaze rested on the newspaper in front of me, whose pages I turned without thinking. The headlines (the news was always about the heat wave or the cricket) were immaterial to me. I had only a vague sense of what was going on. The news interested me only insofar as it provided something to look at and I let my eyes engage momentarily with this or that piece of information, not so much reading as giving them something to do to pass the time. Then I placed the paper facedown on the table, stood up, and sat down again.

I’d never liked crosswords or any kind of word games. It was a musician’s sensibility, perhaps, which made me pay more attention to the sounds of words than to their meanings. I couldn’t even read a novel since before long I’d always find myself in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph with no idea of where I was or what had come before. Tracing a plot or following a cast of characters required a mental gymnastics my mind seemed incapable of. Yet that morning, beneath the obituaries and the classifieds, the crossword drew me in. Who invented the telephone? What nationality was the first dog in space? My hand picked up the pen as if of its own accord. It felt pleasurable to be filling in the empty grid. It felt like doing something, a meaningful activity. Like work, even, to be exerting effort and producing results. The answers came easy at first. But one question led to another and sometimes, beneath the crossword questions, I detected other questions, small, half-formulated questions, questions that were almost too vague to warrant my attention. Why do you just sit there? Why don’t you go out? Why don’t you go for a walk or sit in the garden? But it was too hot to be outside and the grass was full of ants from the figs that had fallen from the tree. And what is the point of walking when there is nowhere you have to be? So I returned to the crossword, which wasn’t as inviting as before. The boxes looked somehow sinister and without purpose. Like molds, or the husks left over from something that had been there once and been taken away. Like holes, I thought. Empty holes. I said the word hole. Hole. Said out loud, it led in two directions: Hole. Whole. There was something about it that my ear liked. Read more…

A New Citizen Leaves a Lost America

Sipa via AP Images

Born in England and granted United States citizenship after 9/11, New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead lived in New York for thirty years. With the country’s profound shift in values under Trump, from tolerance to open hostility towards immigrants and naturalized citizens, Mead decided to move back to England this year, even though it no longer felt like home.

Fittingly, Mead writes in The New Yorker about becoming a New Yorker. While her life in America gave her unparalleled opportunities to report on two decades of American culture and politics, it also provided a lifelong lesson in how to “belong to a country while also profoundly questioning it.”

Now, in the summer of 2018, thirty years after arriving in New York with two duffel bags and a scholarship from N.Y.U., I am exercising my choice: I’m leaving, with a shipping container full of books and other possessions, with a career, and with a family. I am repatriating to the U.K., but I’ve been gone for so long that it hardly feels as if I am moving back. London is the city of my birth, but I was not brought up there, and have spent only a fraction of my adult life there. In London, I have no youthful history to reminisce about, and now when I walk its streets I wear the invisibility cloak of middle-aged womanhood. It will be peculiar to live in a place in which I have no past—or no sense of a past beyond an atavistic one. After George and I decided to look for a house in the borough of Camden, I had the uncanny experience of realizing that, nearly ninety years ago, when my father was a small child, he lived in a cramped Victorian flat less than a mile from where my family and I are now planning to make a new life. I suppose I am going back, in some sense larger than I yet know what to do with.

Read the story

Finding Time to Write Even During the Busiest of Times

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Amy Carleton has an essay on #1000WordsofSummer, the public two-week-long writing accountability project novelist Jami Attenberg offered to writers for free, via Twitter, Instagram, and TinyLetter, from June 15th through June 29th of 2018.

Carleton writes about how Attenberg helped created a “supportive literary community” online, and I concur. In fact, I benefitted from it.

I love my work editing other people’s writing, but I have a hard time finding time for my own writing, and sometimes even forget I’m a writer. The #1000WordsofSummer project came at what seemed the worst time for me. I had lost my stepfather of 33 years less than a month before; I was in the middle of moving to a new house; and I was taking part in bringing to light a local #metoo story.

But it turned out to actually be a fortuitous time for me to commit to writing 1000 words a day; it forced me to create the time, to get up earlier, stay up later, do whatever I had to do to be accountable to myself and the others who were writing. I did it every single day for those two weeks, and proved to myself that even in the busiest and craziest of times, you can find time to write 1000 words. I also enjoyed a sense of accomplishment, and felt for the first time in a long time as if I wasn’t self-abandoning the writer in me.

Many writers, in fact, lament over the number of their words that are “wasted” responding to the latest Twitter-drama instead of focusing on their own creative projects. “If you took all the time and all the words you used on Twitter… you could have written a book by now. #sadfacts,” observes one user.

But instead of perpetuating this regret, Attenberg turned her attention to creative empowerment. Within days, there was a hashtag: #1000wordsofsummer, and within weeks, a newsletter with almost 3000 subscribers. Once June 15 arrived, the daily emails from Attenberg commenced — some featuring guest commentary from other writers like Meg WolitzerAlissa Nutting, and Ada Limón. I printed out the newsletters each day and highlighted the words that resonated most with me; from novelist Laura van den Berg: “Here is the bottom line: I think often of what a painter said to me at a residency: ‘work makes more work.’ Indeed it does. Let’s do what we can.

Attenberg had no idea her project would have such traction. She was pleasantly surprised, to say the least.

Eventually, what Attenberg began on a lark showed how positive and encouraging online communities can be.

“While it wasn’t necessarily my original intention,” she reflects, “it became clear quite quickly that the people participating in it had created their own corner of the internet. I hadn’t been part of something like that before…And I actually found myself looking forward to going on the internet each day, instead of being full of dread about the news. Because I could check in on how people were doing and seeing their progress and say supportive things to them. For two weeks, I was able to be positive in that space, and experience the joy of others as they made progress in their work.

Read the Story

Defeating the Celluloid Axis

Charles Chaplin Film Corporation / Bettmann / Getty

J.W. McCormack | Longreads | August 2018 | 9 minutes (2,429 words)

Here is what we know for sure: in mid-September of 1932, the actress Peg Entwistle, who had galvanized the young Bette Davis to pursue acting after Davis witnessed Entwistle in a Boston production of The Wild Duck, climbed the Hollywoodland sign (years before the sign would be bought by the Parks Department, the last syllable jettisoned) and jumped to her death from the top of the H. In Hollywood Babylon, arcane filmmaker-turner-tattletale Kenneth Anger gruesomely referred to the her as the “skydiver Peg Entwistle” opposite a photograph of an unknown, topless blonde woman.

It’s understandable. By the time Anger published his chatty, often spurious volume of gossip, few readers would have known the difference. Entwistle had appeared in only one film, RKO’s Thirteen Women, unreleased at the time of her death and in which her starring role as the rapacious and lesbian-coded Hazel Clay Cousins had been mercilessly reduced on-set to a mere cameo (still, it could have been worse; only 11 women survived the final cut). And yet, Peg Entwistle’s outrageously on-the-nose suicide would become a kind of synecdoche for L.A.’s glut of broken dreams, placing her firmly among the very first of the tragic blonde bombshells that Hollywood would chew and spit out over the course of subsequent decades, and confirmation for the tabloid-buying public that the movies were an amoral industry, ruinous to female purity, and fatal to those who chased success on its terms while being blinded by its lacquer, froth, and Satanic illusions.

Read more…

Giving Up the Ghost

iStock / Getty Images Plus

Emily Urquhart | Longreads | August 2018 | 19 minutes (4,759 words)

 
After he died, I began to see my brother with surprising frequency. These appearances were not ghostlike apparitions, nor were they dreams. Instead, I saw him in the bodies of strangers. He was waiting for the traffic light to turn so he could cross a busy intersection. A man tipped his hat skyward to read a street sign and my brother’s face hovered beneath the brim. He was the token collector at the entrance to the subway, and he was the lone soup-eater in the basement food court of a downtown shopping mall.

I couldn’t anticipate these visitations. They happened at random and unexpectedly. The people I’d imprinted with my brother’s image were only shades of him — dark hair, a downward slope to their shoulders, a bushy mustache, thick-rimmed glasses. This was fitting because, even in life, I didn’t know him well. My brother was 11 years old when I was born, and we had different mothers. As a child he’d visited on weekends with my other brother. We’d overlapped in adulthood only briefly, so my memories of him are from childhood. They are fleeting and jumbled. It was only after my brother died that I discovered his first name had been Joseph. A name chosen by his mother, but secreted away after birth in favor of his middle name. I learned this from my father when I was tasked with writing my brother’s obituary. I remember feeling awed and somewhat ashamed that I could have spent 24 years in my brother’s orbit but not know his given name. This was just one of the ways I didn’t understand who he was. This unknowing compounded the loss, which was tragic and grim, and I think this is why I bumped into him so often after he died. When he was alive, I never ran into my brother in the city where we both lived.

I was young then, my footing in the world unsure and sometimes timid. When my brother died, I was a few weeks into my second year of a graduate program in journalism. I believed I would never return to school and that I would never write again. I felt suspended among wilted funeral flowers and well-intentioned casseroles with a grief that would last indefinitely. But after two weeks I left my parents’ country home and returned to the city, resumed my studies, and re-entered my life. My upstairs neighbor serenaded me when I arrived at my apartment, assuming all the cards and flowers that had collected at my front door were birthday greetings. I thanked him, gathered the well-wishes, and stepped back into my old life, which was physically and structurally the same, but emotionally rearranged.

I don’t remember the first time I saw my brother in a passing stranger, but I do know that it went on for years. I didn’t investigate why these sightings happened, or if they happened to anyone else. It would take another 17 years for me to do this. Approaching middle age and now a mother, I’m a more confident version of my earlier self. I’m a journalist rather than a trainee, and I’m a folklore scholar. I interview people about their supernatural experiences, respecting their beliefs, no matter how far they stray into otherworldly terrain. In this way, I am now uniquely positioned to turn my gaze inward and question myself.
Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Rohingya Muslim refugees flee Myanmar.
Rohingya Muslim refugees flee Myanmar. (Photo by Kevin Frayer / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Steve Stecklow, Lynn Johnson, Steven Hyden, Morgan Jerkins, and Chris McGreal.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Brown Girl with Bubblegum

Illustration by Loveis Wise

Lisa W. Rosenberg | Longreads | August 2018 | 11 minutes (2,676 words)

My fifth birthday was approaching, and I had one goal: to blow big, beautiful, pink bubbles out of real Bazooka bubble gum. I’d seen it done many times in person as well as captured in storybooks and on television. Bubble-blowing, I understood, was a critical marker of American girlhood — alongside hopscotch, Barbie dolls, and long hair with bangs you could flick out of your eyes with a toss of your head. I remember one image from a magazine: two girls riding bicycles up a tree-lined suburban street, their long, blond hair streaming out behind them in the wind, heads thrown back to relish the dappled sunlight. From the lips of each girl floated a pale pink bubble-gum bubble, half the size of her head. The girls were white, of course. In the ’70s, magazines didn’t show many little brown girls like me — with wild, free-form, biracial hair. I remember gazing and gazing at the picture, admiring those perfect girls with their flawless, pink bubbles. Somehow, someday, that would be me.

Julie Meyers — a girl in my class who was tall, with older siblings, and therefore worldly — could blow bubbles. She had long, straight hair that she was forever sweeping out of her eyes. We weren’t allowed gum at school, but a sister or brother had slipped Julie some Bazooka one day and she was showing off. The bubble she blew was so big, Julie didn’t notice Peter Rothman sneaking up on her — or when he raised his hand to pop it. Bits of bubble gum got stuck in Julie’s hair, which made her cry, but this did nothing to detract from my adulation.

Every day my mother would brush out my curls — like you’re not supposed to do with hair like mine. But Mom was white with short, straight hair and I didn’t have any black female relatives she could ask for advice. Dad was black, but all he knew hair-wise was his own shallow ’fro, which he tended with a pick. Fearing I’d get a headache if she braided my hair too tightly, Mom would work my woolly tresses into two low, loose pigtails. These would hang nicely past my shoulders until about 10 a.m., at which point they’d rise like yeast-laden sourdough, puffing past the bounds of their elastics into misshapen clouds of brown frizz. Maybe I’d never know the delight of my hair streaming out behind me in the wind, but one day, I promised myself, I’d blow bubbles so big and pale pink that I couldn’t see past them. As passersby exalted in their beauty and my skill, I’d suck the gum back into my mouth with a loud crack, and begin again.
Read more…