The Longreads Blog

Behind The Writing: On Interviewing

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | July 2018 | 18 minutes (4,817 words)

I am slightly embarrassed to admit that for a long time I thought of writing in its strictest, most cinematic sense: as the act of sitting before the proverbial blank screen and conjuring meaning word by word, occasionally pounding a fist on the desk for emphasis or stretching to pet the cat. In grad school, I took the maxim that She Who Wrote the Most Became the Best Writer very literally, churning out pages upon pages that yellowed and blew around my apartment. I remember sitting down with one of my advisors for a thesis meeting and expressing some frustration about how research or the logic puzzle of structuring was eating into my writing time. He looked at me a little like how everyone in the Amelia Bedelia books always looked at Amelia. “But that is writing,” he said. I was flummoxed. “It is?” That seemed like cheating. Writing in my mind was only a mystical, pure struggle of sentence-conjuring; everything else was superfluous, a stretch before the race.

As my career has advanced and I’ve published an actual book and written for various magazines and cobbled together a living as a freelancer, my notion of writing has finally expanded to encompass my professor’s definition. In nonfiction, I’ve come to see writing as the whole process of bringing a piece to life and all of its component parts: the interview preparation, the interviews themselves, the transcriptions, the reinterviews, the careful chiseling and combining and rearranging of all this material. Writing is the broad research and the winnowing of broad research into narrower channels and tangents; the notes scribbled in reporting; the random quotes encountered in poetry or everyday life; the highlighting and mapping and organizing; then, finally, the actual word-by-word construction of sentences into story, which is more akin to building a nest from a thousand disparate twigs than conjuring a vision straight from one’s genius literary brain. It is all, in summary, much more humbling than it seemed at the outset.

Last year, I embarked on a project of new depth and scope: a book which entails a great deal of research and interviewing, and whose backbone is reconstructed narrative. As I delved full-time into the work, I realized I was as interested in the particular skills and techniques required to get and shape the material as I was in the material itself. I had focused for so long on the importance of the meaning of the sentence that I hadn’t thought about the art behind the rest of nonfiction writing. Part of the goal of this column, then, is to shine a light on some of those aspects of writing — interviewing, research, structuring, and more — that could be defined as “craft” and are often hidden behind the actual prose.

To tackle this column, I took the standard approach I’ve developed over my early career as a writer: look to the women. Women writers still face entrenched stereotypes and biases, underrepresentation in reviews, and a significant byline gap in publishing. I have found that one silver lining to this discrimination can be women writers’ commitment to helping one another out, supporting one another’s work, and navigating what often feels like an inscrutable insiders’ network together. With that spirit in mind, for this first column on the subject of interviewing, I looked to three women writers whose work I deeply admire: Lauren Markham, Sarah Smarsh, and Jennifer Percy. I read and reread their remarkable books, then spoke with each of them about the skill, art, and technique of the interview.


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One reason I chose these three women’s work was because each of their books leans heavily on reconstructed narrative: scenes from characters’ pasts that the writer didn’t witness and that need to be put together in vivid detail from interviews. Much of my work as a journalist has relied on reconstructed narrative, and I am fascinated by the puzzle of interviewing the same subject over and over again in order to flesh out the shape and texture of their life. It is not a linear process. It does not proceed like: Tell me about the day you did X. How did that feel? What did it look like? What happened next? Now tell me about the day you did Y. For me, it often involves getting a big gush of information in the first interview, then going through it to highlight areas of particular interest or ambiguity, then going back and asking more about those areas, then repeating this process ad infinitum until the information becomes a story.

Lauren Markham spent two years reporting The Far Away Brothers, a beautiful, devastating nonfiction epic that follows twin brothers Ernesto and Raul Flores (not their real names: Markham used pseudonyms to protect their identities) from El Salvador as they embark on a perilous journey across Central America and Mexico to the United States, fight their way through immigration limbo, and struggle to build a new life for themselves so far from home. Markham described her interviewing process as “entering through the side door.” She gave an example from the powerful opening scene in her book: her main characters, the young Salvadoran twin brothers, are in a car en route to a court appointment in downtown San Francisco. They are late, and they are stressed: If they miss this court date they could ultimately be deported. They are driving around in circles with their older brother. First Markham got the information about the times, the streets, the weather, the basics of how they were feeling. But the details that give the scene the poignancy necessary to open a book about American immigration came through the side door: Long after her initial interviews for the car scene, she and the twins were chatting about something else when one mentioned casually that he’d always thought of the United States as a land of skyscrapers, these big beautiful buildings, but once he was here, he realized it wasn’t really like that. Markham asked him how he felt under the skyscrapers in San Francisco that morning, and out of that conversation arose this passage:

At seventeen, the twins have never been to a city before — unless you count San Salvador, which they’d been to only a few times to visit relatives, or Mexico City, where they were practically shackled to their coyote, hunkered down in the spectral underbelly of the pass-throughs. San Francisco looms like no other place they’ve ever seen. Raul used to picture these buildings in the quiet night back home, rising upward like ladders, like possibilities. But now that he’s under them, they’re just endless, indistinguishable boxes. They make him feel, as most things in the United States of America so far do, small and out of place.

These moments, Markham suggests, are not ones you can necessarily ask about directly. “If you say to any of us,” she told me, “‘What are some of the most foundational memories from your childhood?’ we’re like, ‘wahhhhh?’” But if you’re willing to make the investment of time, you eventually find a way in through the side door.

Another day, Markham went on a bike ride with the twins and they told her a story about how when they were little in El Salvador they’d stolen corn and used it to buy a bike; it was such a perfect memory to encapsulate their childhood. To elicit this type of early experience in particular, Markham relied much more on the coefficient of time spent with her subjects than on the expertly crafted interview question. She told me, “I think building real, honest, genuine relationships from your heart with whomever you’re interviewing makes for better journalism and more humane journalism. And of course there have to be boundaries and there has to be the clarity of OK we’re not friends and I’m still a journalist, but you can still be operating from a place of deep compassion and connection with someone.”

Writing about immigrants who attended the high school where Markham works in Oakland, California, posed an ethical dilemma that terrified her initially. She did not want the twins to feel obligated to participate in her project; she did not want to seem like she was taking advantage of her position; she didn’t want to blend her role coordinating services and programs at the school with her role as a journalist. She agonized over this with her boss at work until finally she told her, “Listen, we let journalists in here all the time to connect with immigrant communities, and we are constantly making a calculation of do we feel this person is trustworthy and do we feel that we trust them enough to connect them with students or families. Of all the people I’d want to write this story, it’d be you.” Markham was still uncertain about putting an undue burden on the twins until finally, she told me, she realized, “I was so freaked out about these young people’s ‘inability’ to make a decision and understand the kind of nuances of my dual role, that in fact I was infantilizing them. They walked from El Salvador to the United States, and I was sort of projecting on them this inability for them to understand or to make a decision on their own.” She sat down with them, explained her project, and told them they didn’t have to make a decision right away. By this point, they were no longer students and were 18 years old. She was surprised when they immediately agreed. They wanted to tell their stories. They wanted to be heard.

Throughout the entire writing process Markham was hyper-aware of the clichés inherent in writing about immigrants: painting them as the perfect, sad heroes, as one-dimensional victims. She wanted to include all the complications of their lives, their shitty decisions, their adolescence. They were teenagers, after all, living by themselves in a foreign country. “Showing them in their roundness was a way to crack open the trope of immigration,” she told me.

Her commitment to showing her characters’ full, complex humanity comes through in so many details of daily life and personality: the way the twins’ faces form “matching masks of dread” when they are late for an appointment; the bright red the Mexican snack food Takis stains their lips; the comfort they feel as they cuddle in a pilled blanket with their brother’s girlfriend’s chihuahua; the movies they watch (Finding Nemo) contrasted with their Facebook posts (tough-guy proclamations and shirtless pics); the way each holds a baby (Ernesto, “cautiously, like a bowl filled with water,” and Raul comfortably, “his face soften[ing] into an old expression something like innocence or wonder”). The most potent information, Markham said, came from just talking to and observing them, but it should also be said that her interview process was extensive and methodical. She had a regular interview schedule with the twins and over the course of years developed a “crazy mosaic” of information: details related to the car and the court date, to the journey northward from El Salvador, to the desert, to their time in an immigrant detention center. She knew that the power of the narrative would ride on detail, and whatever she didn’t glean from observation over time, she tried to ask about: What color was the sofa? What about so-and-so’s shirt? Maybe they didn’t remember the sofa or the shirt, but they did recall the wallpaper, and she’d write that down.

The technique Markham relied on most was asking the same question over and over: Tell me again about this.

The technique Markham relied on most was asking the same question over and over: Tell me again about this. “We already told you!” the twins would say, but they would tell it again, and when a detail changed she’d ask about it. She learned this in a workshop with Rebecca Skloot, who said that if you only have the testimony of one person and can’t corroborate, interview that person over and over and see where there are discrepancies. These discrepancies, Markham told me, are often “portals into more complex questions and realities of the story.”

Jennifer Percy also relied on this technique during the three years she spent reporting and writing Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, the harrowing story of a soldier who, after a traumatic event in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of his best friend, returns home to the United States with PTSD and attempts to cure himself and other suffering vets using exorcism in small town Georgia. Percy found herself asking for the same story over and over, trying to break down the heroic version she initially heard. She needed to get through that stiffness of the rehearsed narrative to something rougher and more authentic. She was not after the same kind of authenticity as Markham; where Markham wanted to convey in precise detail the nature of her subjects’ journey northward, Percy wanted to illustrate the emotional and psychological power of war stories, the way they are constructed, the way they can be unreliable, the complex questions that unreliability poses.

Percy was heavily influenced by James Agee’s Let Us All Praise Famous Men and by the notion that nonfiction will always operate with limitations and will never be able to represent the world as it is. These limitations are some of the central tensions of her book; she portrays herself as the writer, the interviewer, struggling to understand across a gulf that is also the gulf between the average American and the soldier returning from war with PTSD. In the parts of the book in which she herself is present as a character, actually depicted interviewing on the page, the reader interviews through her in a way, struggling to make sense of experiences that in the end are impossible to untangle by everyday reasoning. “I asked him all those questions you’re not supposed to ask, about how many you killed, and death and destruction, and I asked him about morals,” she writes. The sense of the terrifying foreignness of both the questions and the answers is palpable. Percy is not acting here as the hidden expert deciphering this world for us, but instead as a novice we can identify with and relate to the characters through. “It didn’t really feel like I was trying to be an expert on the subject,” she told me, “but rather going into it as a question, with questions. That was what was driving the book.” Here the awkwardness of the interview is the story itself: How does someone who has never been to war understand war, and how does someone who has been to war make it comprehensible?

Percy is not acting here as the hidden expert deciphering this world for us, but instead as a novice we can identify with and relate to the characters through.

Percy obtained many concrete details — the height the aircraft at the heart of the narrative was flying when it crashed, its position, its specs — from sources other than her main subject, Caleb. With him, she focused predominantly on how he was struggling to make sense of an extremely traumatic experience.

This meant learning when to stay silent and when to push back. At first, she told me, her tendency was to react to these stories of trauma in the way she would react to a friend who was grieving: to respond empathetically, to ask sensitive questions, to tread very carefully, until she realized that this wasn’t actually what her subjects needed. They wanted her to listen, so she grew quiet and listened.

She eventually became less nervous about asking difficult questions, and as her relationship with Caleb evolved over years and he increasingly insisted on bringing her in line with his vision of the world, she pushed back a little harder against it. This delicate line in interviewing between privileging a subject’s view of the world, trying to comprehend it with as much nuance as possible, and challenging some of the improbable or biased or ethically dubious aspects of that view is one that Percy navigates masterfully. The narrative is tense with interactions like the following, in which Percy gestures to the gulf between her experience and her narrator’s, and to her own doubt, and at the same time gives credence to the necessity and fullness of his convictions. In this scene, she challenges Caleb and he challenges her back, and in the interplay between them lies the trauma.

“I tell him gently how sometimes when people convert to new religions they project their faith backward, using religion to explain difficult situations.”

“That’s all very interesting,” Caleb says,” but I have no doubt that this thing has been after me my whole life. I know you think this all sounds crazy, and don’t get me wrong, so do I.”

He crosses his arms and presses his lips together like a beak.

“What exactly would be the point of me going through deliverance?” I ask. He keeps telling me to consider it.

“Let’s say you did. What do you think it might have?”

I don’t say anything.

Then a few breaths later in that same scene, Percy asks:

“Did you feel anything after deliverance?”

“White noise,” he says. “All this white noise. I didn’t even know it was there and suddenly it was gone.”

In the first third of Demon Camp, which is written like fiction — a lyrical, haunting story of a vet growing up, going to war, and experiencing its horrors — Percy wanted to convey Caleb’s point of view. She taped many conversations and appropriated his language and rhythms directly from those transcripts. She also prepared him for interviews by saying, “I’m going to ask a lot of questions that seem really irrelevant. Can you spend a lot more time talking about this random object in the corner of the room?” She would tell him, “Slow time down to where you’re going to take me an hour to describe ten minutes.” What emerges from this is an almost embodied nonfiction, where Percy is in a way channeling her character. Of the night Caleb lost his virginity, Percy writes, “She showed him what to do in the way a mother might show her child how to fold a napkin.” Of his eagerness to believe in deliverance at a conference in Rhode Island where people came to be rid of PTSD, she writes, “He was born into a family who spoke of God at warm meals.” Percy gives me faith that, with enough time and observation, it is possible to use powerful, lyric prose to convey the experience of another person. She does, however, attribute the particularly lyric style of Demon Camp to the fact that it was her first experience of reporting, and she came into it “without any baggage in that realm.” I, too, feel that I now have too much baggage as a reporter to write as freely as I want, and I find Demon Camp exciting in how it breaks convention with much of standard literary journalism. It illustrates the possibility of being rigorous with interviewing and reporting while still writing a haunting, transporting work, harking back to the writing of earlier literary journalists like Didion and Wolfe.

Percy gives me faith that, with enough time and observation, it is possible to use powerful, lyric prose to convey the experience of another person.

In her highly anticipated debut, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, Sarah Smarsh also wanted to illustrate the imperfections and limitations of nonfiction, and the fact that the stories she is telling are not the ultimate, absolute truth but rather the subjective recollections of individual human beings. She wanted to emphasize the wit, insight, and personality of her characters — her family, blue collar workers who have so often been depicted mainly in demeaning stereotypes, or denied a voice at all in American culture. At first, Smarsh intended to immerse the reader in a narrative that read like fiction, a seamless recounting that made her interviewing invisible. But then, she told me, she realized that “for me, the family members who I was interviewing, who are dynamic characters in the book, are so original and funny and vibrant in their own words that I found however much I honed a narrative based on the things they told me, it was leaving one of the greatest strengths of the story on the table if I didn’t let them do some speaking for themselves.” This was also, she explained, “a subtle way of reminding the reader … (a) I’m not making this shit up, and (b) it’s not all about me. I’m building this from hopefully empathic conversations with people whose stories go back further from my own.” This tactic of forgoing the unbroken enchantment of a narrative that reads like fiction for a sense of real people telling stories allows Smarsh to pull off a remarkable feat: Although her book is a memoir, her voice and presence feel secondary to that of her family, and her consciousness, though it is actually writing and constructing the story, does not feel as though it is what drives the book.

Take, for example, Smarsh’s description of her grandmother Betty’s move from Wichita to Smarsh’s grandfather Arnie’s wheat farm:

Betty peeled untold pounds of potatoes, baked pies, fried meat, and stewed vegetables that grew outside the front door. She learned the isolation of rural life through a batch of cookies — she had everything she needed but the brown sugar. What was she supposed to do, drive ten miles west to Kingman just to get one damn ingredient?

“It wasn’t like when you lived in town, you’d bebop down to the QuikTrip,” she told me years later.

She learned to keep the basement overstocked with discount canned food, the deep-freeze packed with every cut of meat, the cupboards filled with double-coupon deals.

Heartland is driven by Smarsh’s memories and framed by her childhood, but in the end the book is not really so much about her — that is, her interior self and struggle — nor is it propelled by her voice in the MFA-ish sense of “voice.” I was amazed by this when I read the book, and it speaks in large part to the power of her interviewing. In an author’s note that prefaces the book, Smarsh notes that she researched and wrote the book over the course of 15 years, conducting “uncounted hours of interviews.” The resulting narrative demonstrates not only the extent of these interviews, but also Smarsh’s particular understanding of this world and these people and the empathy she has for them. While much of the uniqueness and insight of Percy’s book came from positioning herself as an outsider, trying to figure this world out — she told me that she doesn’t think the book would have had the same resonance had she come into it as a seasoned war reporter — Smarsh’s book derives its empathetic power from her belonging, her intuitive sense of this place. Much of the narrative, and of the conversations in the book, revolve around the tangibles of places, houses, jobs: the emotion is implied and pulses subtly and largely unstated beneath these facts. She was not asking her grandmother, “What did you feel? What did you think?”

Smarsh’s book derives its empathetic power from her belonging, her intuitive sense of this place.

When your own society hasn’t cared about you for decades, she told me, “those truths are experienced at some strata that is below words and articulation.” The lack of articulation of these truths in fact drove her to become a journalist in an attempt to articulate them. What makes her book so singular is the fact that she is able to convey this repressed or buried emotion in the language and the worldview of her characters. She doesn’t try to speak for them in what she calls “fancy English.” (She told me she speaks two forms of English: country and fancy.) She uses her understanding of this place and this worldview not to translate it but to convey it, with the skills and ethics of what she describes as “an old-fashioned hard-ass twentieth-century newspaper training.” We chatted briefly about Katherine Boo, whose work shares much in common with hers, and she remarked that Boo’s writing is exceptional because Boo doesn’t impose “her own inevitably socialized way of seeing reality” onto the people she’s writing about. The same could be said of Smarsh.

Like Percy, Smarsh emphasized the importance of being comfortable with silence. She described the interview as a forced, staged, artificial reproduction of what we do every day: talk to people and elicit interesting stories and information. “It’s sort of like if someone is just naturally hilarious and whenever you sit around and drink beers they crack everybody up, but if you put a microphone in front of that person and you’re like, ‘Be funny!’ they kind of shut down,” she said. This is the awkwardness the interview can generate for writers.

Smarsh told me she hates awkwardness and she has a “crushingly high empathy default setting,” but she’s learned to pause, to leave space for her subject to fill in. The most powerful and true answer might need that space, even if it makes the interviewer squirm.

I asked Smarsh about how interviewing family differed for her from interviewing strangers and if she employed any unique techniques. Her response was that actually approaching family interviews as a journalist — a professional working in a field with specific demands and protocols — made it easier for them to tell her their stories. This approach, she told me, “allowed my family to say, This is just work. I’m a journalist, I’m just doing my job, and if there’s anything my family respects, it’s someone just doing their damn work.” The interviews were not a touchy-feely let’s-all-understand-one-another session or, as Smarsh put it, her family saying in gushing tones, “Let’s support darling Sarah’s work!” Rather, she said, they were “basically the writing version of sharpening some tools in the shed.”

Smarsh told me she hates awkwardness and she has a “crushingly high empathy default setting,” but she’s learned to pause, to leave space for her subject to fill in. The most powerful and true answer might need that space, even if it makes the interviewer squirm.

I, too, have played this I’m-the-journalist role with my family: in particular, with my younger brother, when he went on a soul-searching road trip one summer and I begged to accompany him, as if he were the budding musician and I the rookie reporter for Rolling Stone. I have found it fascinating how much I could not know — and could come to understand — about someone I’ve known my whole life. The space that opens up between family members with that journalistic distance, with the curiosity and novelty of that role, can reveal objects hidden in plain sight. Smarsh describes writing about her family in this way, as a journalist, as “the most transformative process I’ve had as a human being”; in understanding the social, cultural, ground-level factors that made her mother in particular who she was, Smarsh was able to forgive her.

Smarsh described herself at one point as a “journalist of everyday life,” a phrase that seems at once intuitive and uncanny. I’ve come to latch onto it as a guiding principle; I love both its sweep and its specificity. In many ways, the art of interviewing, and of reconstructing the narratives of “regular” people — that is, not celebrities or public figures — is the art of making everyday life exceptional and fascinating, of seeing what we either take for granted, miss, or cast only a passing glance at in our narrow worlds. In the case of all three of these writers, everyday life contained significant traumas that would be foreign to many readers, but it also contained infinite small moments of tenderness, heartbreak, and connection, and the brilliance of their work is the ability to convey both: to map out the forces that shape a life and also all the quirks of individual strength and personality that define it.

The interview can feel like an act of transgression or, at worst, of violation, and at the same time like the ultimate veneration, a low bow before the infinitely layered experience of another human being. It is a unique intimacy, uncomfortable and pleasurable, awkward and at times transcendent, a spark of meaning that flashes between two often very different people. As Smarsh put it, “You are being given a gift.” And as with any gift, the giving and the receiving are complicated: How to reciprocate? How to honor? How to achieve balance? And is that even possible, or the point?

To look at the interview is to understand writing not as the solitary endeavor of the genius performing her sorcery but as relationship, as negotiation, in which a writer is trying to simultaneously remove herself entirely from a story — to in fact scribble out her assumptions and readings — and to purposefully tell that story with all her skill, will, and vision. The interview acts as a prism illuming the ultimate goal of any writing: to use one’s language and self and brain as a way of getting beyond self and language and brain into a larger realm, a shared one, a more universal one built of the most microscopic blocks: And what did the river feel like? Tell me about the wallpaper.

* * *

Sarah Menkedick is the author of Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm (Pantheon, 2017), which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her second book, about an epidemic of anxiety in American motherhood, is forthcoming from Pantheon. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Pacific Standard, Oxford American, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross
Fact checker: Matt Giles

That’s All, Folks! The End of the Blockbuster Era in Alaska

In this March 16, 2018 photo, costumers arrive and leave a Blockbuster video rental store in Bend, Ore. Alaska's last two Blockbuster video stores are calling it quits, leaving just one store in Bend, Ore., open in the U.S. (Ryan Brennecke/The Bulletin via AP)

What’s the major difference between renting a movie at Blockbuster and streaming it on Netflix? As Justin Heckert reports for The Ringer, as the last Blockbuster video stores close in Alaska, people won’t just miss the blissful comfort and simplicity of family movie night. They’ll miss the human interaction that can be the best part of visiting the video store in person: the colorful people, the jokes, the laughs, and the delightful camaraderie of discovering a shared favorite film at the checkout counter.

“People are going to lose the personal touch,” he said. “There are some people who can’t get high-speed internet, and can get only dial-up. Some places that can’t get internet at all. A lot of people don’t have internet here, can’t get it. It’s so far out here, and when [the customers] come in, they get to talk to people — to us.”

He busied himself with tasks that broke up the time, as if he just pretended the store wasn’t closing, maybe it wouldn’t. He opened DVD cases to make sure there was a movie inside, straightened the candy aisle, the popcorn buckets and Snickers bars and Hot Mama pickles and microwavable pork rinds that he would never order again. It would be worst in the coming winters, he knew. When he was working somewhere else, and the residents of Soldotna and Kenai and the little villages were forced by the cold to withdraw from the outside world. When everyone faced the winter with their blankets and Blockbuster movies, the harshest element there being the darkness itself. He didn’t know what people there would do for entertainment. They had always rented movies.

As closing time approached at 10 o’clock, there was a serious question of what might be the last movie ever rented there. Maybe something from the GOLD SECTION, a top seller, a movie like Bridesmaids or Training Day. As Justin went to lock the doors, he let one last customer in. A 28-year-old named Jacklyn Souza, who’d barely made it, who had just gotten off her shift at Don Jose’s Mexican Restaurant, she was almost breathless; she didn’t have Wi-Fi or cable at her house, and this was a ritual for her, and she had rushed in to get a copy of a show she had been bingeing, and at the counter she said “Aaaaah!” when she found out she had a $35.74 late fee. Which she paid. And she had lived there four years, having moved from California because she loved salmon fishing, and the random thing she wanted to watch became the accidental metaphor for something that had long outlived itself: The Big Bang Theory Season 10.

“I’ll tell you one story,” Kevin said. “We had to close the Wasilla store; this little girl, about 7, just cute as a button, she’s just crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ I say. She says, ‘You don’t understand, every Friday, my mommy and I would come out and go to the pizza place.’ … It was called Alaska Pizza Company. They’d order a pizza, come over, get their movies, go home, and have a pizza night every Friday night. And she goes, ‘I don’t have that anymore.’”

t was still better. That’s what the customers said. What the employees said. That was the unofficial slogan of Blockbuster Alaska, and maybe if someone heard that enough, someone from the Lower 48 who’d been streaming movies for years — maybe if they spent some time there, isolated from the horrible internet, they’d get that feeling, too. They’d want to believe it was real. They would go to Blockbuster, for the first time in forever, bidden by nostalgia, to see whether it was still better; better than what they had 4,000 miles back home.

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Should We Really Confide in Siri?

LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 14: A man uses 'Siri' on the new iPhone 4S after being one of the first customers in the Apple store in Covent Garden on October 14, 2011 in London, England. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

As it turns out, people don’t just ask Siri to do metric-imperial conversions or find the nearest burger — they also share their deepest, most private feelings. At Aeon, Judith Duportail and Polina Aronson explore not only how artificial intelligence is shaping (or perhaps misshaping) human growth and experience, but how cultural norms affect what constitutes a proper response from a robot and how developers need to be vigilant about the information they’re feeding the machines in order to learn.

In September 2017, a screenshot of a simple conversation went viral on the Russian-speaking segment of the internet. It showed the same phrase addressed to two conversational agents: the English-speaking Google Assistant, and the Russian-speaking Alisa, developed by the popular Russian search engine Yandex. The phrase was straightforward: ‘I feel sad.’ The responses to it, however, couldn’t be more different. ‘I wish I had arms so I could give you a hug,’ said Google. ‘No one said life was about having fun,’ replied Alisa.

This difference isn’t a mere quirk in the data. Instead, it’s likely to be the result of an elaborate and culturally sensitive process of teaching new technologies to understand human feelings. Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just about the ability to calculate the quickest driving route from London to Bucharest, or to outplay Garry Kasparov at chess. Think next-level; think artificial emotional intelligence.

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Searching for Caravaggio in the Kitchen

They say we eat with our eyes first — but is food nourishment, or art, or both? At Taste, art history professor Noah Charney tries to answer the question, looking at the similarities between professional kitchens and Renaissance artists’ studios.

Mechanically reproducing recipes well and consistently is all that most diners require. Cooking is largely a repetitive series of movements, following formulas we call recipes, and it can be taught at schools or through restaurant training. How to fillet sea bream, perfectly cook a steak, boil al dente pasta—these are attributes of disegno.

But it’s invenzione that distinguishes a great chef from a good cooks. “You have some chefs who are artists and have a vision, and those chefs are creative,” Ripert says. “They’re creative by inventing new techniques, by using new ingredients in new ways, by creating new flavors and consistencies, and so on.”

So let’s leave aside the good cooks and consider the great chefs. Are they up there with the great artists? Can Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner stand alongside Leonardo’s Last Supper, or Thomas Keller’s Oysters and Pearls beside Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring? And is David Gelb a modern-day Giorgio Vasari, filming, rather than writing, a sort of group biography of the greatest chef-artists of our age?

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Dead Girls: An Interview with Alice Bolin

Laura Palmer, Twin Peaks, American Broadcasting Company

Hope Reese | Longreads | July 2018 | 12 minutes (3,114 words)

“It’s clear we love the Dead Girl, enough to rehash and reproduce her story, to kill her again and again,” writes Alice Bolin. “But not enough to see a pattern. She is always singular, an anomaly, the juicy new mystery.”

In her debut collection Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, Bolin takes aim at what she calls the “Dead Girl Show” — a genre of entertainment that centers around solving the mystery of a dead, or missing, girl. Approaching the subject with deep intellectual curiosity, Bolin dissects texts and manuscripts — from Joan Didion’s nonfiction to Veronica Mars — that reveal how dead “girls” or women have become a trope of entertainment, serving as a vehicle for sleuthing or as a venue to sort out “male problems.” The result is a compelling case that these plotlines are not merely problematic and inaccurate, but are damaging to society.

The “Dead Girl” genre, Bolin tells me, is not just about gender — it’s equally about race. “There is a lot of privilege wrapped up in the dead girl body, and in the ways that the body is sanctified. That’s a better reason than any to let some of these stories go: the overvaluing of a white woman’s body,” she said. “It’s not good for anyone.” Read more…

Why Is Australia Deporting So Many Maori and Pacific Islanders?

Photo by: Christoph Hardt/Geisler-Fotopres/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

For The New York Times, New Zealand-bsed journalist Sylvia Varnham O’Regan examines Australia’s new aggressive deportation policy. Since Australia modified its immigration law in December 2014, visas have been cancelled and deportations have increased dramatically. Many deportees are native New Zealanders who moved to Australia to work and have little to no connection to the New Zealand they’re sent “back” to. Some have lived in Australia most of their lives and are now separated from their children in there. Based vaguely on “character” or criminal activity, 60% of deportees are Maori or Pacific Islanders, suggesting a racist motivation. New Zealand wants to know what this is all about.

Those returned also include a former soldier with no criminal record and a quadriplegic man who  lived in Australia for 36 years, while in March a 17-year-old boy was placed in an adult detention center 12 hours away from his family — the youngest New Zealander yet to be detained.

Australian officials defend the approach. In an emailed statement, a government spokesman said the deportation measures had been introduced to “protect Australia and its citizens.”

But New Zealand officials say Australia is undermining the two countries’ historical bonds of “mateship,” with free movement across their borders dating to the 1920s.

Read the story

Defined by Want

In “The Food of My Youth” at The New York Review of Books, Melissa Chadburn describes a childhood in which getting enough to eat was a much bigger concern than it should ever be. Eventually, she was removed from her mother’s care and put into a group home. There were regular meals there, but three meals a day doesn’t erase the scars of a childhood defined by want.

It was lonely there, but at least I didn’t have to worry about going hungry. I didn’t like to eat food prepared by other people—I was afraid I would taste their emotions—so I learned to cook the food provided by the county. It was largely frozen, prepared in bulk. Salad was a sturdy iceberg with sliced carrot slaw; the ground beef came in a fat tube. The group home kitchen, with all its canned food, and dates on plastic containers, resembled a bunker in the Midwest, as if we were all preparing for the apocalypse.

Only, for us, the explosions had already happened. The places we’d called home had been lit up and burned to the ground, with nothing left save for the blackened foundations of our past. We kids were screaming for love, for touch, for home. But we found ourselves in limbo, guarding our hearts, biding our time before the Unknown, waiting to see where we would end up. In that place of permanent temporariness, food was the only thing we had some control over; the rest was all court dates and social workers and group therapy and anger management.

Read the essay

The Tyrant and His Enablers

Culture Club / Getty

Stephen Greenblatt | Excerpt adapted from Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics | W. W. Norton & Company | May 2018 | 14 minutes (3,827 words)

From the early 1590s, at the beginning of his career, all the way through to its end, Shakespeare grappled again and again with a deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?

“A king rules over willing subjects,” wrote the influential sixteenth-century Scottish scholar George Buchanan, “a tyrant over unwilling.” The institutions of a free society are designed to ward off those who would govern, as Buchanan put it, “not for their country but for themselves, who take account not of the public interest but of their own pleasure.” Under what circumstances, Shakespeare asked himself, do such cherished institutions, seemingly deep-rooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to? How does a figure like Richard III ascend to the throne?

Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency? Read more…

Muscle Memory: A Case History

Illustration by Cat Finnie

Mariam I. Williams | Longreads | July 2018 |5794 words (28 minutes)

Age 35

Juan, my physical therapist, is teaching me how to feel.

I have a back injury. The disc between my L5 and S1 vertebrae, the lowest vertebra in the lumbar spine and the top vertebra in the sacral region, herniated when I slid down a metal pole and landed on my butt during my second — and probably last — pole dancing fitness class. I was 32 at the time. Despite six months of physical therapy, the pain returns, always near the time of year of the original injury. I overestimate myself, leap too high, tread the elliptical too long, turn too quickly, twerk, and the muscles in my back spasm until I can do little more than lie on the floor, stomach down, and cry. The doctors say the spasms are my body’s way of protecting itself, immobilizing me to prevent further injury.

I’ve been in Juan’s care for the past few months. He’s my third PT in three years, and from day one, he’s been certain I can return to doing the activities I most enjoy without reinjuring myself. I just have to retrain the muscles.

“I had some trouble the past couple weeks,” I tell him on my first visit to his office in almost a month. We’ve decreased the frequency of my sessions because my healing has progressed. “And since you trained me to stop engaging my abs all the time, people ask me if I’m pregnant.”

Juan laughs at me openly. Then, as I describe the sensations I’ve experienced since our last meeting — dull aches around the spine, sharp pangs in the oblique muscles as I twist my torso, shakiness in the shoulders from muscle fatigue, stiffness when I fold forward — I notice Juan close his eyes, just as he does when he presses his fingertips to my abs, back, or glutes to test that the correct muscles contract as they should when I perform an exercise he has assigned. Juan has stationed me in front of a mirror only once. He wants me to be attuned to my body, to know what is right and wrong for it and for me through the way my body feels.

“The body must relearn that the necessary muscles will turn on and off when needed. You’ll get there,” Juan encourages.

I know Juan is right, that with every exercise he has me perform for four sets of 20 repetitions, my brain is memorizing my body’s movements, recording mechanics of motions that will teach me to move in ways that keep me injury-free, to feel when I have shifted my toes even one degree out of proper alignment. Yet it is difficult for me to believe my arrival is possible. I have learned to trust neither feelings nor the body — even the heart.

Age 28

I stopped trusting my heart four years before the back injury, when I was 28 years old, convinced God wanted me to marry Brian, in love with Nathan, and terrified of being wrong either way. When I was convinced but not sure, when I was not feeling the peace that other Christians had told me comes from absolute certainty. After I had already dumped Nathan twice in 18 months. Before I knew Brian and I were in year four of what would turn out to be a five-year on-again, off-again relationship, and he had spent the past two months trying to coax me back “on.”

On the night I chose between Brian and Nathan, I heard Jeremiah 17:9 — The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it? — in my head. I replayed it as I had heard it in several sermons spread out across preachers, churches, and years: with musical crescendos, rhetorical phrases, and questions a congregation answers in classic Black Church call-and-response style:

Preacher: You think it’s love at first sight. You “felt” something.

[Congregation responds with laughter — some sardonic, some nervous.]

Preacher: And you go after them because, “I just know God put me at the mall right then as they walked by!” But all God did was give you eyesight, and all that man or that woman was,was fine.

[Congregation lets out extended falsetto, “Wooh!” or firm, full “Teach!”]

Preacher: Some of y’all married right now to somebody you can’t stand and God didn’t design for you, and it’s somebody you never would’ve been with if you had just asked God in the first place before going after that man [Congregation: Well…], going after that woman [Congregation: Say that!], trusting your feelings, following your heart. Don’t you know the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked? Who can know it? Who can understand it?

I asked myself these same questions as I considered the superficial — how even my mother, with her high standards of appearance, said Brian and I looked good together as a couple. Our fashionable lens frames complemented each other’s, his dark skin and insistence on neckties balanced my light complexion, blond Beyoncé weave, and penchant for cowrie-shell jewelry. I considered the serious — how the previous year we had each written separate and almost identical descriptions of our expectations of marriage. I thought about the challenges of our long-distance relationship, of seeing each other only twice within the past three years, of the nights I spent alone and crying because, for whatever reason — work emergency, a car accident, him declaring I didn’t make him feel loved enough — Brian missed another planned rendezvous. I considered Brian’s past two months of calls and poems, his high-pitched voice mournful. Then his tears and reminders — So Nathan talks to you all day, just like I do? Real love is hard to find. Nothing worth having is easy. You said you wanted us to be “a spiritual power couple,” remember? And finally, his ultimatum: Email Nathan by midnight tonight saying it’s over, and copy me, or we are done — for good.

Jeremiah 17:9 would override both the advice a therapist gave me in college to actively listen to my gut and every book and article I had read since then about how to make better decisions.

According to the therapist and the books, you can discern your heart, hear your gut, decipher a Morse-coded right way by applying a test: Lie on the floor. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Relax your body completely. Place one hand on your stomach, the other over your heart. Alternatively, hold two fingers to the neck, over the carotid artery. With hands in their proper positions, let your lips utter your options in a simplified form — one sentence or less. Do not recite the pros and cons of each. Do not envision your life unfolding with one choice or the other. Just speak it.

Don’t you know the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked? Who can know it? Who can understand it?

On the floor of my apartment, I spoke a name into the ether. “Brian.” My pulse was too hard to feel beneath the muscles that had tightened. My stomach felt as though I were starving on that August night, only an hour after dinner.

“Nathan.” Facial muscles were not supposed to be involved, but the ones around my mouth curled up. My stomach fluttered, pulse strengthened, yet my body felt the same way it had one year before, on a park bench in Lexington, Kentucky, when I rested my head on Nathan’s chest, listened to his heart beat, felt happiness I was afraid to name.

Lying on the floor, I heard the preachers.

You love him. You love her. So you convince yourself sleeping together okay, even though you’re not married. You forgot, the heart is deceitful above all things. What you’re feeling for that person is probably in your body and you can’t let carnality lead you — ’cause the body will change, and your feelings will change. But the Word of God doesn’t.

The preachers’ voices planted what-ifs. What if Nathan weren’t a 6-foot-1, bald, muscular martial artist? What if he weren’t the finest man ever to show me attention, if I didn’t check out his ass as he walked away the same way he peeped mine? So what if his baritone makes me shiver? What if I had just followed the rules and never had sex with Nathan or Brian? Brian was my first lover and wanted to be my last and only. He understood the guilt of desire and held my hand through it. He’d been in my life for so long; so what if Nathan is only an hour away and everything is easy with him? But Nathan is distant this time, cautious. You’ve returned to Brian twice; Nathan told you he won’t let you hurt him again. But what if Nathan keeps coming back just because it’s physical?

“Call Nathan and tell him it’s not working out this time,” I said out loud. “This third chance he’s given you. Don’t offer an explanation — or do. Tell him God said — shhh. Too much thinking will mess up the test.” I felt the fight-or-flight response engaging.

You know the Word: Present your body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing unto God. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then —

“Trust Brian is the man God wants for you.” My facial muscles collapsed. The pain that comes from emptiness moistened my eyes, loosened mucus. I sat up to spit it out of my throat.

— you see, something else happens first; you can’t trust feelings, and magazines, and Oprah, and TV, and what everybody else is doing, you have to renew your mind — then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is. His good. Pleasing. And perfect. Will.

The heart is deceitful. Feelings change. And I was seeking perfection.

Age 11

I first learned my body was wrong in a doctor’s office.

“I’m concerned about her weight. You see how she has that pregnant look?” I heard the doctor say this to my mom as I sat on the exam-room table, hoping I would be finished soon with the physical my middle school required before I could try out for the dance team.

I stared at and squeezed what my family always called everybody’s “meat-meat” and tuned out the rest of their conversation. Just before school started, my aunt — my only skinny aunt — had taken me shopping and said, “Don’t tell me we have to move you up another size,” when she saw my stomach pushing out against the zipper on a denim skirt I thought I could still fit. Despite my aunt’s bluntness, the doctor’s words shocked me. I hadn’t known it was that bad, even though I was aware I didn’t look like other girls my age. All I had cared about with regard to my body up until that point was that the clothing covering it looked stylish and that my body could move as well as any other girl’s, or better. I felt good about both aspects. My grandparents bought me almost anything I wanted from Sears and J.C. Penney catalogs, dance teachers had placed me in the front row for routines since I was 3, and I won dance contests at Girl Scout camp. Suddenly, at 11 years old, a doctor alerted me that I was so big, I looked like I had another person growing inside me.

There is something arresting about honesty, the way an encounter with the truth about yourself moves you to change. I had gone to the dance team’s summer clinic — sort of a pre-tryouts audition/reality check — before the physical. I wasn’t the biggest girl at dance team clinic, but out of more than 200 girls, only a few were larger than I was. Ashley Stevens, a white girl I had gone to school with until she moved away in third grade, wasn’t one of them. She had been thin back then, but now she was precise; she came back bragging about having a 17-inch waist. To me, she looked fragile. Nicole Kurtz, also entering the sixth grade with me, looked normal, I thought — flat chest, thighs that didn’t meet when she walked, slight swoop for soon-to-be hips; not so small she might break, not anywhere near so big she looked pregnant — and she moved in ways I wanted to move. Nicole took lessons at a professional ballet school and had danced in The Nutcracker with the local ballet company since she was 7. Her fouetté turns were fast, sharp, and perfect, her grand jetés like splits in the air, but she could also body-roll and butterfly with so much funk the black girls — including me and the coach, who carried about 80 percent of her body weight in her thighs and behind — were stunned. After the clinic and the physical, I wondered if losing weight would help me get my splits off the ground and make my body-roll look the way it was supposed to.

Between the physical and the first day of school, I came across a diet called the Alaskan Special. I don’t know how the diet ended up in my hands, printed out on plain white paper with purple-tinted ink, but it promised weight loss fast, so I was determined to do it. My mother, probably thinking I would grow bored with the plan, neither encouraged nor rejected it, so the diet commenced. Day one: Eat only fruit. Day two: Eat only vegetables. Day three: Eat both fruits and vegetables. Day four: Eat “the cleansing soup.” I followed without straying the first three days, but day four was broth with too many vegetables I hadn’t heard of. I lived in Kentucky and didn’t know then that I shouldn’t have expected to find these ingredients in any grocery store in the land of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s colonel, so by the time my mother and I made it from the store to her car without celery root, I was crying.

My mother asked me what was wrong.

“I need the …” I managed to eke out through gasps and dripping snot.

My mom had had enough. “Stop it! We don’t know where to find this stuff, and we can’t afford it anyway. There will be no more Alaskan Special!”

So I went back to eating bacon and eggs for breakfast; grilled cheese or hot bologna sandwiches for lunch; sloppy joes, beef stroganoff, or chicken à la King cooked in butter for dinner — except on Sundays, when we ate my grandmother’s fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, green beans cooked in ham, broccoli casserole with lots of cheese, Rice-A-Roni, and tea my mom slow brewed and always put the right amount of sugar in, without measuring. And I got my daily treat of frozen cookie dough.

I didn’t make the team, not that year or seventh grade or eighth grade. A part of me blamed my body. Some of the girls were shapely, looking closer to full-grown women than 11-to-14-year-old girls. Some had body parts that jiggled uncontrollably under their purple spandex uniforms. But none were fat or overweight or big-boned or heavyset or thick or seemed to have “meat meat” on their stomachs. Even if I could have danced like Nicole — and very few girls could, even the ones who made the team — I knew I wouldn’t have looked right in that uniform.

Age 21

“What God gave you isn’t pretty,” Dr. Paul said, peering at my teeth. He was the bluntest dentist I’d ever been to. Though he crossed the boundary between hard-to-hear professional opinion and rudeness, I didn’t feel the sting I had felt in the pediatrician’s office when I was 11. This time, I knew. The dentist I had seen throughout childhood made an annual appeal from when I was 9 until I left for college: “You really should think about braces before you get any older.” The orthodontist he had referred me to took a deep breath and asked permission to be frank before saying, “Basically the rest of your teeth have grown in so close together that they’ve pushed the front teeth out to make room for themselves. I recommend extracting four of your molars, wiring your mouth shut, then wearing braces for four years.”

Nearly every kindergartner I tutored twice a week for my work-study job at a literacy center had asked me, “Why are your teeth crooked?”

Dr. Paul said I had “a beautiful bridge” on the bottom row, but the top, where my two front teeth slightly folded in toward each other like a book attempting to close, “is ugly.” Like the breasts that ceased to grow past my fourteenth birthday, the stomach and hips covered with marks that prove they stretched themselves far past their intended stopping points, and the ass that denied its blackness (“You got a white girl booty,” a black female classmate told me in high school), my teeth had betrayed me. My top teeth grew in crooked, but an accident when I was 8 years old — my face colliding with another kid’s cheek during a game of blind tag — exacerbated God’s meanness. Unlike the fad diets I began at 11 to alter my body-shape heredity, however, Dr. Paul could fix cosmic cruelty. And unlike previous years, my mother finally had enough cash for the remedy. I would give Dr. Paul the money, and he would saw off my tooth enamel and replace it with several layers of hard resin.

I have learned to trust neither feelings nor the body — even the heart.

When I returned to the office one week after the consultation and sat in Dr. Paul’s chair, my entire body recoiled, cringed, and jerked away from drills, needles, gauze, even his rubber-gloved hands.

“We don’t have to do this today,” he said. He set down his tools, removed his mask, and waited.

God, what do I do? I heard nothing.

My body told me to run.

But I didn’t ask my body what to do.

What if running is the wrong choice? What if my mother never has the money for this again? What if my graduation photos are ugly? Money for cosmetic surgery is a blessing. God, what. Do. I. Do?

My body told me to run.

I heard nothing.

The next month, my graduation photos were beautiful. The little chip on the right front tooth where dental floss broke the inferior resin wasn’t noticeable to anyone but me.

Dr. Paul fixed it at no charge, but I would forever question my decision to stay in his chair. Was that God speaking through my body? Did I remain in God’s perfect will? Does God always tell people to stay when they know they should leave?

Age 31

The  man I woke up with was singing, “Jesus is on the main line, tell him what you want. Call him up and tell him what you want,” as I lied on his couch, read the verse of the day from my Droid’s Bible app, and thought to myself, “Jesus, I want Nathan.” Nathan was not the man singing. Nathan, I could then say with certainty, was the man I would have followed, had I followed my heart when I was 28.

With the song still in my head three days later as I drove to my gynecologist’s office, I told Jesus, “I want Nathan, still. I want my gynecologist to say there’s nothing wrong. I want to believe your answers to my prayers. I want to stop ruining what you promised me. I want to learn my lessons faster. I want to stop feeling like this is punishment.”

You prayed about this, I reminded myself. It was in passing that I prayed — perhaps while changing clothes or on the treadmill — but in earnest. “OK, God. I’m almost thirty-two. Nathan is engaged now. Brian’s not the one, either. So please, tell me if I have a husband and family in my future. If the answer is no, that’s cool, but you gotta let me have casual sex.” I meant sex that was different from what I’d had with Brian or with Nathan. Sex that wasn’t confusing or naïve, that didn’t result in, or from, feeling.

The first night at the apartment of Not Nathan, a man I’d met six months prior but spent all of two dates with, I couldn’t do it. Not Nathan kissed my neck, lifted my shirt and bra to kiss my stomach and breasts. He unzipped my shorts, removed them and my panties in one swoop. He shifted my legs to spread them on the love seat we shared, knelt down, and slid his head between my knees.

I thought about how good a man’s tongue had felt there every other time. And it wasn’t for lack of skill on his part, but that God-yes rush of pleasure didn’t happen. Smelling my own scent on his face didn’t make it happen. Seeing a man close to my type — dark skin, bald, taller than me, fit enough — naked, fully viewing what I literally had dreamt about a few nights before didn’t make it happen. Telling myself, You’re a grown woman. Make it happen, didn’t make it happen. I had bargained with God, and I thought my prayer was answered. I simply couldn’t have casual sex. That meant what I wanted was still waiting for me.

There is something arresting about honesty, the way an encounter with the truth about yourself moves you to change.

But a week later, there was enough desire, enough will, enough wetness, to act. I ignored what I had thought was God’s\answer of “Yes, you will marry and have children,” and followed my body. And three days after Not Nathan and I had sex, I was in my doctor’s office. Nothing hurt; there was just bleeding. Not like menstrual blood a woman can feel her body expelling. “It doesn’t even show up on a panty liner, but it’s there,” I told my doctor,  “on the toilet tissue,” mysterious and bright scarlet.

I had never bled from sex with Brian or Nathan.

“You used a condom?” The doctor asked, scribbling on her chart.

“Yes.”

“Then I highly doubt it’s an STD or STI. Was he a particularly large man, or had it been a while since you’d had sex?”

“Yes and yes. Three and a half years.” I didn’t tell her the merging of our bodies felt as technical as a biology book’s description of sex.

“That probably explains it, but I’ll look anyway if you’re still concerned.”

I lay on the table and placed my bare feet in the stirrups. My doctor spotted a tiny abrasion on the vaginal wall. She told me it would heal on its own.

“In the meantime, no tampons, no intercourse. But there are other ways.”

“Got it.”

“And when you do return to vaginal intercourse, continue using condoms, especially since it’s a new relationship.”

 If only it were that, I wanted to say.

Three weeks after leaving the doctor’s office, it’s midnight, and I’m driving Not Nathan’s car to pick him up from an airport two hours away. When I leave his apartment in the morning, I’m wearing the tiniest pair of jeans I’ve ever owned. They are my benchmark, my proof: I can weigh below 130 pounds. Not Nathan’s hands slide up my waist and back as he kisses me goodbye once, twice.

“I have to go. Gotta hit the gym today.” I poke my stomach to the left of my exposed navel.

He raises one eyebrow, takes in my body, then looks me in the eye. “Girl, ain’t nothing wrong with your body.”

On my way home, I relish the lust that produced his compliment, hunger to hear it again. It is the highest praise.

Age 32

Church isn’t the place most people take an HIV test, but it was World AIDS Day, and the pastor decided to show solidarity with the cause by inviting a nurse from the Department of Health to provide free HIV testing for every member interested. He said he and his wife got tested that morning, “and all is good — praise God.”

The last time I’d had an HIV test, I was 22 and applying for the Peace Corps. I had never had sex of any kind then. I had never even kissed anyone. The nurse sped through the risk assessment questionnaire — it was quick, since all my answers were no — then asked, “So why are you getting tested?”

“Peace Corps application.”

“Oh.” She rolled her eyes and told me to roll up my sleeves.

Results took several weeks then. I waited without waiting. I returned to the clinic to pick up my test results. As I was leaving, a jolly woman at the front desk gestured to a basket on the counter and offered, “Baby, you want to take some condoms with you?”

“No thanks.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” I smiled and skipped out of the office.

There is something freeing about certainty. To make a declaration in your mind, even without uttering it out loud or letting it take deep root in your heart, is to walk through life holding a magic lamp that clears dense fog along your personal path for miles ahead. Through nods of agreement with promises my college friends made, through joining in on their amens after the Bible’s purity verses, through guilt, through the convenience of not dating anyway, I silently said, I will wait until marriage to have sex. And at 22, I skipped out of that health clinic.

At 32, I waited about five minutes for the results of an oral swab test. It still didn’t feel like waiting. I took the test to be an obedient congregant. The nurse and I talked about the weather, how much she enjoyed the 8:00 service at my church that morning, the room we were in and how beautiful its décor of poinsettias and garlands was. “The fireside room, it’s called,” I told her. “Usually guest preachers wait here until they come into the service.” Most of my answers to the “Have you evers” were still “no.” Most of them.

I didn’t know Brian’s status. I had asked and believed his answer. He was the only man I had ever trusted in that way.

Brian and I never used condoms — never. Not even after I was with Nathan during an “off” time, and a woman Brian was seeing at the time sent me an email telling me she was sure he was gay because he couldn’t get excited about her. I, on the other hand, had rarely seen him flaccid, so I figured he just didn’t want her, and I was safe.

Brian was safe. And familiar. He was never my fantasy, never the man I wanted, never my heart’s choice. But he blew out my first magic lamp at a time that I needed it darkened, when I needed to discover and experiment with sex and touch without feeling lost. And he replaced it with another light — one just as bright but more colorful, more encompassing. Brian showed me that I could have sex, and God wouldn’t punish me but would still love me.

But what would God let me get away with if love, commitment, or monogamy were absent from the relationship? If I only wanted pleasure, what would God think?

Age 33

I’ve been seeing my physical therapist for about eight months, and I’ve figured out her goal is to make my muscles so fatigued that by the end of our session I cry.

Today she’s gentle. She massages my back and glute muscles with her hands this time, instead of kneading out the spasmed tightness with her elbows. I’m her last patient of the day and the only patient in the room. We’re going over the activities I’ve tried this week and any pain I felt while doing them. I got through 30 minutes of Zumba. Lost a lot of flexibility in yoga. I’m up to 15-second planks on the TRX.

“I tried something else recently that I don’t usually do,” I add.

“What?” she asks.

“Sex.” I cringe as I say it. This conversation is confidential, and my PT is a professional, but she is also a Catholic. Not a lapsed Catholic, she speaks highly of her parish. The radio station in the office is normally set on either a Top 40 station so clean I nicknamed it “Radio Disney” or on the Christian rock station. My intake forms show that I’m single. I don’t want to hear the silence Christians give other Christians when they disapprove of their behavior but are in a setting that demands politeness or professionalism.

Do I really need a PT’s approval for sex? Will she be more understanding if I explain that it started with burgers?

The scene: Me and my friend DJ — 35, medium brown, attractive, male, an Army vet who, save for his close-shaven fade, looks too easygoing to ever have been in uniform — waiting for a table at a restaurant serving burgers whose calories he suggested I burn off with sex.

“That’s not just me trying to be inappropriate,” he said. “I’ve heard it can help with back problems, you know, because of the release.”

I had heard in DJ’s suggestion a chance at redemption. It gave me hope I could be the woman he had seen when he met meat a professional networking event about two months before my injury. DJ told me he had watched me for almost half an hour that night, waiting for a moment to talk to me.

We tried dating then. I told myself my allure for him was sexual, but I felt girlish and awkward the first night we had sex. The dress I had chosen for the evening — a floor-length pink halter sundress that accented my shoulders and made my A cups look purposeful — couldn’t outwit my afro puffs and the permission I had secured from my mom to leave the house at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. Me: “Hey, I’m going out. Can you move your car? You’re parked behind me.” Her: “Going out where?” Nearly a year later, I still wanted to live up to the potential of the woman DJ first saw. A grown woman could enjoy just a release.

I say none of this to my PT. I cringe and wait.

“Oh, yeah, that’s okay.” My PT’s massage shifts to a rub. “Just keep the positions pretty standard. On top or on your side will probably be most comfortable for you. But yeah, of course, sex is fine. The release can even be good for you.”

 Of course sex is fine. In the four years since I broke up with Brian, no one has said this to me. In that moment, it feels like sex may always be fine, that years of awkwardness, of hating my body, of hearing that on my wedding night desire will return untamed after years of resisting it are gone. That the sacroiliac joint is functional, the pubic muscles will relax every time I open my legs. That the heart has forgotten its muscle memory.

Age 35

I’ve just told my doctor that the pain in my back resurfaces at about the same time every year, near the date I slid down a stripper fitness pole and ruptured a disc. The doctor, a resident at the teaching hospital Juan recommended for muscle manipulation therapy, let out an involuntary squeal and told the med school student interning with her that what I’ve described fits Dr. Robert Fulford’s theory about the body having memory.

In his book Touch of Life, Fulford writes, “An anniversary of an illness can make you recall the past memory of your pain and the details of your life since then, the bad as well as the good. Something about this process is weakening. … No one has a clue why this happens, but it’s my guess that traumas get imprinted either in the nervous system or in the muscles.”

Or, as my doctor summarized for her student, “Body remembers trauma. Pain comes back around the anniversary of the trauma.” Then she turned back to me, sitting in the examination chair. “Now I’m going to ask you something that will sound a little strange. Sometimes pain shows up again on an injury’s anniversary because the body wants to remind us not to return to whatever we did to cause the injury in the first place. I want you to think about that as I ask you, do you need this pain?”

I think about my life before the injury, before I knew the location of my L5 and S1 vertebrae, before the Notes app became my pain journal.

Before, to be exact, six days before capping off years of two to three hours in the gym, six days a week, with a spinal injury — I had sex with DJ for the first time, even though I’d had a feeling it was a bad idea. Even though I had felt juvenile. Even though I had felt, at 32, I was never going to be grown enough at what I was trying to do.

Dr. Fulford believed “the mind creates reality. Any discord or disharmony that is permitted to exist in the mind is likely to produce an unfortunate effect in the physical body.”

This pain is a reminder, an imprinted memory: the fear of happiness in a heartbeat, the freedom of certainty, the imprisonment of seeking perfection — all are there, dwelling in the muscles and the nervous system, from heart to perineum, from brain to spine.

This pain is a reminder: I overestimate myself. I stretch too far. Enjoying noncommittal sex, maybe enjoying all sex, without guilt, is unrealistic. Whenever I’ve come close to letting go, the pain is there, reminding me to dismiss desirability, dismiss the body’s wisdom, that the heart is deceitful. Do you need this pain?

 “No. I don’t need it.”

On the table, the doctor folds and twists my body into pretzels. I hear cracks and pops. Feel them, too.

The healing is not immediate. The pain is a reminder, and forgetting it will require another year of visits, a lifetime of care and awareness of my body. But at that moment, I know: I do not need godly love to be this way. I trust my body’s wisdom. My heart is certain.

* * *

Mariam I.Williams is a Kentuckian now living in Philadelphia where she creates narratives affirming black womanhood. Her work has been published in Salon, The Common, Nothing to Lose but Our Chains: Black Voices on Activism, Resistance & Love, and other outlets.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Why I Lied to Everyone in High School About Knowing Karate

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Jabeen Akhtar | Longreads | July 2018 | 16 minutes (3,917 words)

In 10th grade, I was chosen to be photographed for a yearbook feature called “Out of the Ordinary Hobbies.” The yearbook staff heard I had a green belt in karate and wanted to do an interview with photos. Anna*, a yearbook editor, approached me about the feature while I was organizing my locker.

“How did you know I knew karate?” I asked her.

She said Rodney told her, who heard it from Julie. Or maybe Heather. I didn’t remember telling Julie. Or Heather.

“I mean, a green belt, wow,” Anna said. “Not many people have those types of skills.” Anna said she always wanted to take a self-defense class. Why didn’t the school offer karate instead of stupid stuff like home economics? She’d rather know how to protect herself than sew a button. Maybe I could give her a few pointers, she said, show her what to do if someone attacks her with a knife from behind.

Author yearbook photo, 1990

I nodded along as Anna spoke, pulling textbooks from my backpack and stacking them in my locker where the poetry collection I had written for third period English sat visibly on the bottom shelf. “SMERSH” the title of the collection said, which was also the name of Stalin’s counterintelligence agency. Below it was the subheading, “Death to Spies.” It was 1990, and though the Cold War had recently smashed into pieces, wall by wall, mallet by mallet, we still spoke its language. It was no surprise to me that things like the USSR, KGB, dead drops, poisoned lipsticks and perestroika would find their way into the stanzas of my electric typewriter-printed pages. Besides, poetry, I had decided, need not be tedious ruminations on flowers or pallid reflections on grief.

My English teacher had disagreed. “Too James Bond,” she wrote across the title page, marking it with a “C.” I placed my civics book over the top of it, hoping Anna didn’t see my grade.

“The yearbook feature is new so we really want the best of the best,” Anna said. “So tell me…are you in?”

Mary Lynn entered the hallway, her wall of freshly lacquered bangs holding steadfast as she shuffled past us towards her boyfriend’s locker. She was one of the few headbangers to penetrate the wealthy student government crowd, however tenuously, clearly trying to hide her behind-the-gym cigarette habit from them with an extra splash of Jean Naté. She glanced at me over her Trapper Keeper, her eyes a mix of curiosity and mild indignation. No one ever stopped by my locker to talk to me and now here was someone from the yearbook staff and the visit looked official. Clearly, I had been chosen, out of the entire student body, for something in the yearbook. Something important. Which meant that in some capacity, I was important.

I couldn’t blame for Mary Lynn for being skeptical.

Anna’s pencil anxiously tapped her notebook. She was waiting for a response. I stuck my hand deep within the bowels of my locker, searching for a purple scrunchie and in my mind, searching for a way to tell her.

“Well?” she asked again. “Will you do the yearbook feature? Are you in?”

I’d been here before, in this same position years ago, and I knew what I needed to do. I needed to stop what I had set in motion. Stop things before they went any further, before they perilously and irrevocably went too far. I needed to tell Anna the truth.

I’d never had a day of karate in my life.

I looked down again at my locker, where my “C” hid under a pile of textbooks. I zipped up my backback and swung the locker door shut.

“I’m in,” I told her.
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