The Longreads Blog

The Danger of Desire

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Faylita Hicks | Longreads | April 2020 | 28 minutes (7,041 words)

I was late. Even though the album dropped in 2018, I didn’t know about the track until June of the next year. Which was tragic, because the first time I heard Teyana Taylor’s “WTP (Work This Pussy)” — I went off.

The command hit my speaker and I dropped the washrag I had been using to clean the dishes, into the soapy water. Splashing it all over the frail kitchen counter, I leaned forward over the sink. Gripped its metal edge in instinctive obedience, desire trickling through my body electric. Throwing my head back, I left behind the part of my day that had been filled with judges, sheriffs, the DA. I turned the music up, grinding my pelvis to the tempo, shuddering in spasmodic rhythm to twerk.

I wanted to shake out the fear I had carried since that afternoon’s Criminal Justice Committee meeting with the county officials. Forget all about the Black and Brown bodies that slept in a small metal box less than five miles away from me. Swaying from side to side with my eyes closed, I let guiltless memories of pleasure snap neon through me. Let holographic echoes of my past life — the time before I was an activist and after I was a Christian — fill to the brim the dusty corners of my small and empty Central Texas apartment. Hot, I rode the hum that rolled out from my bluetooth speakers, ignoring the sound of my phone vibrating with updates from the group chat about bail. All I wanted was to make my lower back flinch as I rolled my hips and popped to Teyana’s simple instructions — work this pussy, work this pussy, work this pussy.

But I must’ve been too tired. Too tight in the shoulders to flex and hold the pose. Too thick in the thighs now to dip low and pounce back up with ease. Too heavy with the backhanded comments about criminals and “bad decisions.” Too dizzy from the tight, bone-straight lace front that had made me feel more pretty in a room full of white. Too distracted. Too hurt. Too tired. Like trying to shake molasses off of me, I rotated my hips in place. But nothing moved as easily as it used to. My rhythm was off — and it made me wonder. How long had it been since my back was blown out?
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“The Beauty of the Moments that Pass Each Day”

Autumn in the Ozarks / Getty Images

As writer and photographer Terra Fondriest notes in this stunningly beautiful photo essay over at The Bitter Southerner, her family is among the newest on their dirt road, having only lived in rural Arkansas for 11 years. In a series of intimate portraits called The Ozark Life project, she documents her neighbors and the bounty they share and preserve in land, family, livestock, hard work, and tradition.

This Ozark Life project is a lot of things for me: a way to get to know the people around us, a way to record this time and place from my perspective for the history books, and a way to pursue a personal challenge. But, perhaps the reason that motivates me the most is connecting the Ozark culture to the life I used to live in the Chicago suburbs. By seeing moments that are totally normal in the Ozarks, moments that make me smile, and realizing how quirky those would look to a person living outside this area, I can relate our mountain world to other people.

Often these are snippets in my own family’s everyday life, but lately I am spending time photographing others in my community. I am drawn to documenting people who work using their hands and ingenuity to make a living. Those who are following their passion and those who are making a living off of the land here. I love spending time with other families similar to my own, who are navigating life here, each with its own twist.

I am still the same introverted girl who grew up in the suburbs. Getting to know new people makes me more nervous photographing for this project. It’s a challenge that is daunting on most days, but the camaraderie built by pushing through that with my subjects yields the intimacy I strive for in my storytelling. Some of the folks I photograph are friends and neighbors, but others are people I meet through circumstance, whose everyday story I find interesting and a good piece for my Ozark Life story quilt. But I approach them. I might talk to them right away about my project, or I might let it simmer a bit and get to know them over days, months, even years before I bring up my project and my request to photograph them.

Time moves, everyone in their own rhythms and situations, yet it’s a cadence we all relate to. The difference between the Ozarks and the suburbs where I grew up are the ties people have to the land, which grow deeper with every generation. Will Norton can point to the soil under his feet and say his granddad’s dad farmed the same soil where he now raises both cattle and his family. There’s a respect and connection to these hills that’s hard to put into words; it’s almost like a heartbeat that the land infuses in you.

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This Week In Books: Too Small For the Occasion

John Keats reading a book of poetry, after portrait by Joseph Severn. English poet, 1795-1821. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

I’m sitting here trying to write up my little “This Week in Books” list, and it’s a real problem, because the literary corona-articles I saved last week already seem… slight. As in, too small for the occasion; preposterously hedged with absurd little silver linings. Re-reading one article I’d saved for my list, I ended up having to ask myself, is it actually ok to conclude that the typhus scene in Jane Eyre demonstrates how pandemics can be beneficial unstructured time for children!? But this isn’t me being critical, ok, this is me saying: that Jane Eyre article is already 10 days old, and what’s happening now is, the exponential growth of the disaster has made all these corona-articles floating in its wake appear smaller and smaller at a similarly accelerated rate. Last week seems so tiny; last month is minuscule. I dare you to try reading anything from February about the coronavirus; it feels sort of like going insane!

The real problem with the literary corona genre, to be honest, is that as the days go by, and more “essential” workers sicken and die, I feel my interest in anything about corona not written by or about essential workers kind of fading. The travails of lockdown are real, of course, but the thing to keep in mind about lockdown is that it is safety. There’s only so much we can complain about this before we start to reveal something… unpleasant… about ourselves; before we begin to align ourselves with what’s being done to the “essential” working class in this country. The mass sacrifice. It’s like the government is sending soldiers into combat with no guns, or something; like the Battle of Stalingrad, but for no particular reason!? I saw a tweet by a garbage collector who said that a passerby yelled at him for wearing a mask because he doesn’t deserve it as much as a healthcare worker. I saw a tweet quoting a month-old Facebook post by a bus driver worrying that his job will endanger him, with an addendum that he has already died of the virus. I see photo after photo of “essential” workers with no masks or PPE of any kind and think to myself that this cannot possibly be okay. Two weeks ago, the FedEx guy was parked outside our apartment — and we were watching, because any time a truck or something pulls up in the street that’s entertainment for us now — when suddenly he screamed, and I mean really goddamn screamed, to no one and to every one of us who was peeking at him out our windows: “What are we even doing out here!!??” The silence that followed was profound.

Doctors and nurses need PPE desperately, but also, so does everyone who’s still at work! So demand not only that your governments provide PPE for your healthcare workers, but for your garbage collectors, too. Please!

That all being said, I’ve still got a few literary corona reads here for you. I’m not trying to, I don’t know, make a grand statement. Just a small statement. I’m voicing a concern — a tiny but exponentially growing concern — that in a couple weeks this will all seem insane. Read more…

“Leave Us to Our Peace”: A Pact Made in Love

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At Outside, Eva Holland brings us a thoughtful piece about the right — and the privilege — of getting to die on one’s own terms.

Eric and Pam Bealer were the epitome of resourcefulness. Both artists lived in a remote area of Alaska. They raised animals and vegetables on a wild landscape that was often the inspiration for the art they created. After Pam was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in the aughts, the couple enacted a plan to end their own lives at a time they chose.

Solovyov later told me that, when he saw the little boat crammed with art that March day, he should have known. For years, the couple had talked with close friends about their intention to die together when Pam’s time came. She did not wish to see her disease through; Eric did not plan to live without his wife. But it was one thing to talk about this in the abstract. It was another for Solovyov to stand in the harbor and realize that his friend had prepared his last exhibition. “He brought everything with him,” he said.

Isolated as the cabin was, they had a neighbor there, and his place had Wi-Fi, which they were able to use even when he was away. So they were generally in touch with people by e-mail. When that communication stopped, in mid-September, their friends took notice. They put the word out to folks in Pelican: If anyone was heading for Yakobi Island, could they look in on the Bealers?

On October 5, a pair of Pelican-area residents, a married couple, made the trip to the island. Leaving his wife in their boat, the husband hiked up a trail to the Bealers’ cabin. The screen door to the covered porch was open. He went in and found a plastic bin filled with packages and letters, and a note taped to the glass window of the main door, which was locked. On one side the note read: “Hello, if you are looking for the Bealers… Please read this. If you found this, please mail the attached packages. It will go to the people who will know what to do next and take care of things. Please accept the cash as a gift to pay you for your trouble, and postage for these packages and envelopes.”

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On Racism and Epithets

Brian Ach/Invision for Spaulding/AP Images

One of the greatest features of the literary essay is its flexibility. An essay can be linear and chronological. It can be digressive and circular. The dots it connects can form a trapezoid whose structure remains hidden until the last sentence makes everything crystal clear. The best essays are, as essayist Phillip Lopate once said in a lecture, a map of the movement of a human mind, and part of an essay’s pleasure is seeing how different minds work.

For the New England Review, fiction write Robert Lopez explores racism’s vastness and influences, in both his life and the world at large. Ranging freely to collect seemingly divergent points, he connects elements from American culture with his past and present to create a brilliant, fresh portrait of racism and its lasting effects, using particular racial epithets to lead his way. We always need powerful perspectives on American racism. His is wildly original and affecting.

I used to describe myself as half Puerto Rican and half Italian and half Cuban and half Spanish. I called it the new math.

Of course it wasn’t true, those percentages. But saying one was a quarter or eighth or some other tiny fraction of anything always felt stupid to me.

Which is akin to being classified as a quadroon or octoroon, which was also ridiculous and awful.

During American slavery, quadroon was used to designate a person of one- quarter African ancestry, that is equivalent to one biracial parent and one white or European parent; in other words, the equivalent of one African grandparent and three white or European grandparents.

Some terms for quadroons in Latin America are morisco or chino.

In the ’90s I worked at an Italian restaurant on Long Island as a waiter and, like in many restaurants in New York both then and now, Latinos staffed the kitchen. One such line cook was referred to as Chino. That’s what everyone called him and that’s what I called him. I have no idea what his given name was, perhaps it was Roberto or Jesus.

You can imagine why he was called Chino.

The term mulatto was used to designate a person who was biracial, with one pure black parent and one pure white parent, or a person whose parents are both mulatto. In some cases, it was used as a general term, for instance on US census classifications, to refer to all persons of mixed race, without regard for proportion of ancestries.

The US Government used quadroon and octoroon, etc., as distinctions in laws regarding rights and restrictions.

The only math I did as a teenager was the calculation of batting averages and earned run averages, the probability of drawing to an inside straight, now known as a gut-shot straight, which you should never attempt.

Now the only math I do is by increments of 15. 15-love, 30-15, deuce.

My tennis community here in Brooklyn is diverse and glorious. In the past year I’ve played with Mexicans, Guatemalans, Haitians, Jamaicans, folks from Qatar, Egypt, Nigeria, all manner of Europeans, quite a few Australians and South Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Pakistani, even people from Ohio.

White, black, brown, color and off-color. All kinds of fractions.

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Performance Art: On Sharing Culture

Stefano Mazzola / Awakening / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  9 minutes (2,261 words)

The image that struck me most was the empty piazza. That Italian square — I believe it was in Venice — with no one in it. Maybe a bird or two. It looked inviting but also wholly unnatural. A city square is made for people, lots of people, people from everywhere. If people aren’t there, does it cease to be a square? I wondered the same thing about the Louvre and its tens of thousands of objects with no one to look at them — is it still a museum, or is it just a warehouse? I wondered about all those Berlin concert halls with no one to hear their music, all those Indian cinemas with no one to watch their films, all those crumbling ruins everywhere, standing there with no tourists to behold them or to record that beholding for everyone else. At this particular point in history, does art exist if we aren’t sharing it? 

By sharing I mean not only sharing a moment with the art itself, but also sharing the space with other people, and more literally, sharing all of that online — posting updates on Facebook, photos on Twitter, videos on TikTok, stories on Instagram. This kind of “sharing” is constriction rather than expansion, regressing back to the word’s etymological root of “cutting apart.” This contortion of a selfless act into a selfish one is symptomatic of a society that expects everyone to fend for themselves: Sharing online is not so much about enlightening others as it is about spotlighting yourself. It’s impossible to disconnect the images of those now-empty spots from the continuous splash of reports about the coronavirus pandemic gouging the global economy. In America, the economy is the culture is the people. Americans are not citizens; they are, as the president recently put it, “consumers.” And on the web, consuming means sharing that consumption with everyone else. That the images suddenly being shared are empty exposes the big con — that in reality, no one has really been sharing anything. That social distancing is nothing new. Read more…

A Long, Lonely Time

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Hannah Seidlitz | Longreads | March 2020 | 11 minutes (2,999 words)

Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

There was nothing better to do during the Sunday thunderstorm. I had never seen it, and my mother insisted. A slate of clouds had spooked the February sun from sight a few hours too early. New York dripped like Vancouver, where we had lived by the ocean when I was small. Tinny droplets thrummed the roof. We stretched out together on the olive-green sofa. Her fingers threaded through my dark curls. I remember little of the movie. I remember the warmth more than anything. The orangey glow haloing Demi Moore as she tracked a penny along the doorframe. Heat emanating off my mother’s chest. Embers sputtering in our fireplace. I don’t know where my father was. Moore’s amber eyes glittered, incandescent with awe, when her spectral beloved usurped her coin-pushing, the doorframe a Ouija board animated by yearning, devotion. I remember knowing then, with a certainty I have not felt since, that love was the only thing in the universe warm enough to conquer the cold, ineluctable and everlasting, that awaits us.

* * *

A few months after my mother died, I asked my father about their wedding song. I had seen enough movies to expect any newly anointed couple to inaugurate the ballroom reception with a waltz.

My father gripped the wheel of our Honda Pilot with one hand, the other drumming the black driver’s door through the open window. We were singing along to a scratched-up Darkness on the Edge of Town CD, my favorite of Springsteen’s. My father insisted The River eclipsed it in emotional intelligence, that on The River Bruce howled and hummed a hunger so raw, unconquerably raw, that nothing that came before it could compare. But I held true. His guitar on Darkness, I felt, told the deeper story: Rumbling through this promised land, tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea, and wash these sins off our hands. 


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“I want to get married to this song,” I said.

“No, no. It’s much too fast,” he said. “You need something to sway to.”

“‘Racing In The Street’ is kinda groovy?”  He shot me a sidelong glance.

“All right, all right,” I said, lowering the volume knob. “So what, instead?”

His brow furrowed. At once, together we realized the real question into which I had stumbled. We were quiet.

After a stretch of silent highway, I whispered in as steady a voice as I could muster, “What was you and Mom’s song?”

His eyes fixed on the road ahead of us. He sucked his upper lip through his teeth. “Unchained Melody,” he said. “From Ghost.”

* * *

My parents were married in June ’96, in the backyard of the yellow Dutch Colonial where my father grew up. She was beautiful and he still had all of his hair. In the framed photo on the dresser in my childhood bedroom, my mother leans against my father’s lapel with a sprawling bouquet of pale pink and white roses. Ivy spills out from beneath the satin bow that holds the stems. Her sweetheart gown is sleeveless, secured by a strip of organza encircling each arm; her chest bereft of jewelry, only her protrusive collarbones accessorize her décolletage. (She was 114 pounds on her wedding day, she made sure to remind me any time she bemoaned the weight that collects with age. I read in a magazine that you gain one pound every 10 years, she groused once, grimacing at the scale.) Her brown curls were swept off her face and gathered loosely beneath a beaded brooch which fastened her veil in place, exposing her Grace Kelly widow’s peak, dark eyebrows, and rosacea. All of which I inherited.     

So, they danced to “Unchained Melody.” Darkly funny, prescient. (What ruthless narrative parallelism!) It’s as though they had, paranoid or prophetic, preordained a soundtrack for grieving.

I often wonder how they came to select it. They would’ve been standing in the tiny kitchen of their cramped Greenwich apartment, staring at the pile of papers — drafted guest lists, caterers’ business cards, venue release forms — scattered across the dinner table. My father might say, Deb, no self-respecting man likes the Dixie Chicks. (This was, of course, pre-Iraq.) One hand on her hip, the other propped against the counter, she’d hiss, Sarah McLachlan is not a Dixie Chick. Whatever, he’d grunt. Let’s do “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” and call it a day, he’d say, slugging his Lagunitas. Probably she would mutter under her breath, I knew I should’ve done this with Karen, which would, understandably, really set him off. Your yuppie sister doesn’t know Lou Reed from a broken dishwasher. And they would be fighting already, even though they weren’t married yet, which is when domesticity really goes sour, I guess. At least she doesn’t listen to Blink-182 when she vacuums. It’s like living with a 17-year-old. Even without children to fight about, there are always living disputes. At least I vacuum, all you do is complain! and, realizing his gaffe, he’d gush, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Deborah. I love you, falling to his knees before her, taking her hands and cupping them against his cheeks. She’d sigh. She was always sighing. I love you, too. What about something from a movie? It would be immediate. Self-evident as if it were divinely sanctioned. In unison: Ghost?

I remember feeling certain then that love was the only thing in the universe warm enough to conquer the cold which awaits each of us, inevitable and everlasting.

Prior to Ghost’s popular ascription of mourning to its lyrics, “Unchained Melody,” I imagine, was romantic: about heartbreak among the living, about infatuation, about leaving girlfriends behind to go on tour, about a distance that is literal and bridgeable. It’s strange to think that the Righteous Brothers outlive my mother. Sometimes I pretend they are singing to her:

Oh, my love
My darling
I’ve hungered, hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time

Their countertenor melodies permeating the soil over which her ashes have been spread, electrifying each scorched cell, piecing them back together the way I have often dreamed, resurrecting her.         

* * *

It occurs to me now that my father may have been onto something about The River, that perhaps “Racing in the Street” isn’t the ideal first dance song after all, but instead “Drive All Night.” Its revolving drumbeat, slow and certain, Bruce’s longing gravelly and bare. Baby, baby, baby, I swear I’ll drive all night again / just to buy you some shoes, and to taste your tender charms / and I just want to sleep tonight again in your arms.

My parents took me to see him when I was 7. I’d been begging to tag along for years, desperate for a taste of the intimacy that adults seemed privy to, the urgent togetherness of live music. To my dismay, Madison Square Garden’s pounding speakers and towering bleachers, which elevated around and above me tens of thousands of strange, middle-aged headbangers, proved too overwhelming; I spent the better part of the evening curled under the stadium seats with a tray of greasy chicken fingers, clinging to my mother’s legs and failing to stave off my first panic attack. I don’t remember if my parents held hands or murmured the E Street Band’s cloying refrains in unison or exchanged inside jokes regarding all the past shows they’d been to, decades before my time, when Bruce could still somersault across the stage. I can’t remember if they kissed or cried. I can’t remember if they ever touched at all.

In the desperate bowels of stagflation, Springsteen saw a dark fissure in our country’s consciousness and filled it with effervescent synthesizers, optimistic choruses, a new national anthem. Clarence Clemons’s bright sax buoyed bleaker tableaus on timeless chart-toppers like “Dancing in the Dark,” Danny Federici’s honky-tonk keys and organ on “Glory Days.” This sound, the sound of a better future, propelled the Boss to commercial success.

I’d been begging to tag along for years, desperate for a taste of the intimacy that adults seemed privy to, the urgent togetherness of live music.

This sound, the sound of a better future, is absent, achingly so, from the Righteous Brothers’ oeuvre. Their greatest hits are elegiac. They reminisce about the better times of yore with no eye toward proaction. Their songs about “glory days” lack Bruce’s cheeky irony. Bring back that lovin’ feelin’, they sing on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

Cause it’s gone, gone, gone
And I can’t go on.

* * *

My mother died six years ago in October. She was struck and killed by a car crossing the street in front of a Mexican restaurant. I’d turned 15 two days before. At her funeral I sang “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” by Bob Dylan, the Jeff Buckley version. When Jeff sings Dylan’s song the words lose their edge; they bleed into something pulsing and vulnerable. The way Dylan’s relationship-dirges croak with characteristic gruffness safeguards them against that sort of frailty. Don’t get me wrong, of course Dylan feels, and he feels consumingly, gutturally, but he manages to expel his woe by growling. Rather than bowing, succumbing to anguish like Jeff seems to, he gnashes his poetry through his teeth like some animal. The hurt filters outward, not inward.

Blood On The Tracks, which is, in no uncertain terms, one of the desert-island greatest heartbreak records of all time, quakes with this grit throughout. The stories he tells, purported to illustrate the collapse of his marriage, would be almost unbearable if not for the way he barks to banish emotion. Each verse on “Simple Twist of Fate” is more agonizing than the last, cataloguing the gradual demise of an affair, and relies on the modulated last long vowel sound of every penultimate line for catharsis.

He woke up, the room was bare
He didn’t see her anywhere
He told himself he didn’t care
Pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside

Here his cadence breaks down into even more of a spoken drawl, then ascends the scale as he bellows: To which he just could not relate. He nearly yells the latter syllable of relate, as if he were an ancient funeral wailer. This purgation is absent from Jeff Buckley’s soft, wounded crooning. Dylan exorcises his woe; Jeff doesn’t seem quite as conquering.

“Mama, You Been on My Mind” opens, Perhaps it is the color of the sun cut flat and coverin’ …  and his voice wavers, cleaves as though he is about to cry. He continues in a whimper, the crossroads I’m standing at, or maybe it’s the weather or something like that / Oh, but Mama, you’ve been on my mind.

I sang Buckley’s version because I do like it better, but mostly I sang Buckley’s version because he sounds like he’s crying the whole time. I knew I would probably be crying the whole time.

You know I won’t be next to you you know I won’t be near
I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind

* * *

A year after my mother’s funeral, insistently independent and 16, I spent Valentine’s Day at a friend’s house. Reclining against quilted throw pillows, I inhaled buttery crackers smeared with baked Brie, swipes of fig jam — effectively feigning epicurean sangfroid. If I could perform a coolness, an entitlement to luxury and contentment, I didn’t have to consider dearth. Somehow the warm wheel of cheese made loneliness feel farther away. Jay’s TV room swelled with laughter and the warmth of sardined bodies all crowded against the arm of the couch closest to the screen. I sat beside Jay, admiring their resemblance to their mother, against whom they were nestled, who, equally striking, gave Jay their emerald eyes, the warmth in their auburn waves. The three of us were watching When Harry Met Sally.

Young Carrie Fisher lectured, All I’m saying is that somewhere out there is the man you are supposed to marry. And if you don’t get him first, somebody else will, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that somebody else is married to your husband. I winced. I was entangled then in something that resembled a relationship, but the movie made me cry for the only boy I had ever really loved. It had been nearly a year since our last wistful, forbidden kiss, the sweet-sour ale taste of his tongue only teased by his breath during our hushed conversations, our faces always too near for ex-lovers. He had a girlfriend then, one whom, to my schadenfreudic surprise, he would proceed to date for only three apparently unspectacular months, before ex-post-facto-dumping her by publicly asking another girl to prom. 

If I could perform a coolness, an entitlement to luxury and contentment, I didn’t have to consider dearth.

Someone knocked at the front door, rousing me from my reverie, before entering. Jay’s father shuffled through the foyer, cane and newspaper in hand. Jay’s mother, his ex-wife, stood to greet him. Gingerly, he kissed her on the cheek. So stunned by the unlikely tenderness of their exchange, I nearly forgot myself, had to blink away inappropriate tears. That he could show affection to an old love even after they’d parted legally and domestically seemed unfair to me. Why my father couldn’t still touch my mother, couldn’t show her he loved her even after his affair, even after the years of therapy, after everything, wasn’t just. He could never atone; they could never overcome as Jay’s parents had, not even as friends. Recovery halted abruptly. Penance did not. 

* * *

My parents had never got around to formalizing their divorce. After my mother found out about his infidelity, my father slept in the guest room alone for six months.

He had been away, on a business trip in Phoenix, Arizona. She had called him in the morning from New York. The voice that answered was alien. Certainly it belonged to her husband, but it was constricted, fraught with something indiscernibly foreign. Before she could ask him if everything was alright, she heard another voice in the room — a woman. 

It’s on Tunnel of Love, Springsteen’s anomalously inward-facing record, uncharacteristically centering disappointment over hope, which he released in 1987 after his separation from Julianne Phillips, that he sings of the doubts and estrangement of married life.

Now look at me baby
Struggling to do everything right
And then it all falls apart
When out go the lights
I’m just a lonely pilgrim

Perhaps my parents would have divorced had they had a few more years. They did not have a few more years. After the accident, my father began to screen the regular calls from their couple’s counselor, Cynthia, until finally the insurance company informed her that one of her clients had died. Cynthia stopped calling. My father never returned to therapy.

As I watched Jay’s father lower his lips to the rosy flush just beneath his old lover’s cheekbone, I couldn’t help but burn with envy.

Bruce continues: Tonight our bed is cold, lost in the darkness of our love. God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.

Is Harry bringing anybody to the wedding? Meg Ryan’s query reminded me to check in on my father. He was home alone. I had deserted him in the drafty house he and my mother had designed together some decade earlier on his first single Valentine’s Day in 22 years. Not out of malice, but because I couldn’t stomach the burden of his grief atop my own. Because I was terrified to see him cry. Terrified to cry in front of him.

He was under the covers with a bottle of wine watching Schindler’s List on HBO, he told me. I thought of him in the spacious master bedroom. The cold side of the king-size bed. UNACCEPTABLE, I texted back.

Fifteen minutes later his BMW pulled in front of Jay’s house. I stormed down the porch steps, “Schindler’s List! Are you kidding?”

“Yeah I know,” he raised his hands in shame, surrender. “I know.”

“Dad, you can’t be that guy,” I spat, dropping into the passenger seat.“Well, you aren’t leaving to be with me,” he hazarded. “Right?”

“No.” I lowered my gaze to the floor. “No, of course not.”

Unable to reestablish eye contact, I switched on the radio.

Lonely rivers flow, to the sea, to the sea. “Unchained Melody” blared through the car stereo. Scarcely another beat played before I slammed the power button, slumping back into my seat.

“Hannah, why’d you shut it off?”

“For fuck’s sake, Dad,” I snarled.

Without another word, he revved the ignition and sewed us into the night.

On the sleepy freeway we drove in silence for a long time. Through the moon-blackened windshield I watched skeletal trees bend by, lanky brown smudges against the pitch dark. Brake lights splashed red against the glass. At long last, after steeling myself for confrontation, I spared a glance at my father. His knuckles, bound around the steering wheel, glowed white. He was like an owl, impossibly still, his head motionless between his shoulders. All of a sudden, a swell of tears freed themselves from his eyes. I had seen my father cry only once, at the funeral. The disloyal streams slipped across his cheekbones. Swiftly, he pawed at his face, clenched his jaw, returned his fist to the wheel as though nothing had happened.

I flipped open the center console and fumbled through it for a few moments before extracting what it was I went looking for. The plastic case bore cracks on the spine from a shelf life as old as I was. I fed the scratched treasure of a disc into the CD slot.

Track 10. Play.

Three triumphant piano keys, a G chord.

Well they’re still racing out at the trestles, but that blood it never burned in her veins. Without moving his head, the corners of my father’s mouth twitched. A smile. It was ours, he knew, this familiar anthem beating through the car. With our lives on the line where dreams are found and lost / I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost … The descending riff, the cymbal crash. He was grinning now. For wanting things that can only be found / in the darkness on the edge of town.

 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang
All Mom’s Friends, by Svetlana Kitto
The Coastal Shelf, by June Amelia Rose

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Hannah Seidlitz is an NYU MFA candidate and amateur semiotician living in Brooklyn. Her work appears in LitHub, Electric Literature, QZ, Entropy Mag, and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Pneumonia coronavirus

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jessica Lustig, Ed Yong, Leslie Jamison, Rosa Lyster, and Geoff Edgers.

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1. What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick with Coronavirus

Jessica Lustig | The New York Times Magazine | March 24, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,227 words)

“You shouldn’t stay here,” he says, but he gets more frightened as night comes, dreading the long hours of fever and soaking sweats and shivering and terrible aches. “This thing grinds you like a mortar,” he says.

2. How the Pandemic Will End

Ed Yong | The Atlantic | March 25, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,549 words)

“The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.”

3. Since I Became Symptomatic

Leslie Jamison | New York Review of Books | March 26, 2020 | 6 minutes (1500 words)

A month after filing for divorce, single mom Leslie Jamison contracted COVID-19. She wrote this meditation on single parenthood, loneliness, longing, and frustration while sheltering in place — and sweating out the virus — with her 2-year-old daughter.

4. Where Water Used to Be

Rosa Lyster | London Review of Books | March 25, 2020 | 11 minutes (2,810 words)

A look at another crisis the world is facing: water scarcity. Rosa Lyster examines the water-stressed cities of Cape Town and Mexico City — cities grappling with issues related to climate change, infrastructure, and inequality.

5. Sinéad O’Connor is Still in One Piece

Geoff Edgers | The Washington Post | March 18, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,857 words)

“She tore up a picture of the pope. Then her life came apart. These days, she just wants to make music.”

Can Sinéad O’Connor Find Peace?

Sinéad O'Connor (Photo by Don Arnold / WireImage)

Sinéad O’Connor maintains her proudest day is the one in 1992 when she tore up the pope’s photo on Saturday Night Live. Some suggest she’s been struggling ever since, but it seems the problems started much earlier, with an abusive childhood at the hands of a deeply religious mother. Nearly 30 years later, at age 53, after four marriages, four children, and a series of physical and mental health issues, she’s transposed her anger and anguish into music — headlining a series of sold-out shows on the east coast of the US (now postponed due to Coronavirus). Read Geoff Edgersexcellent profile at The Washington Post.

There are still moments when O’Connor will break down, either in fury, tears or a kind of self-loathing. But during her most recent hospital stay, which ended last May, she learned an important concept, which has become her mantra: radical acceptance. As a girl, she suffered abuse from her deeply religious mother that remains with her decades after her mother’s death. In the past, she’s tried to fight and deflect it, sometimes by lashing out at others. She’s learned that this doesn’t help.

“Because that kind of pain doesn’t go away,” O’Connor says. “You only learn to live with it. Music is where I can manage it.”

She sat there quietly. Even as O’Connor finishes a memoir aimed for the spring of 2021, starts work on her first album in years and awaits the second leg of a tour — a string of sold-out East Coast shows, including at the Birchmere, which have been postponed due to coronavirus concerns — there is a bigger project underway. How to live.

O’Connor doesn’t have a home studio or notebooks lying around filled with song drafts. She writes, she says, largely in her head. A melody will strike, the words will come and she’ll repeat the whole thing until it’s ready to be laid down as a demo.

Reynolds, her longtime producer, remembers O’Connor composing virtually all of 1994’s “Universal Mother” in a single night, simply singing into a tape recorder. She isn’t afraid to share her inspirations, whether the therapy time in “Milestones” or “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” about her relationship with former manager and onetime partner Fachtna O’Ceallaigh.

Read the story

“The Leaky Vessel”: On Lewis Carroll and the Perils of Being Female

Rachel Vorona Cote (Author photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | March 2020 | 10 minutes (2,706 words)

We’re delighted to bring you a brief excerpt from “Chatterbox” — chapter 2 of Rachel Vorona Cote’s excellent book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today.

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We’ve been fortunate to publish Rachel Vorona Cote in the past. Check out The Fraught Culture of Online Mourning, and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music.

The strictures of twenty-first-century little girlhood might, at a glance, seem inconsequential when set alongside the demands laid before Victorian children—including the Brontës—and yet, present-day expectations are enduringly rigid. It is true that the last few years have yielded a modest offering of feminine fictional icons modeling less constrained behavior—both Brave’s Merida and Moana’s titular heroine are standout examples. The latter’s release was nothing short of sensational: here, finally, is a nonwhite female character who is reduced to neither racial nor gender stereotype. Accordingly, she’s positioned neither as a damsel in distress nor as an object of desire—Moana’s romantic life receives no narrative attention, and her chutzpah saves her island, however much it unsettles her father, the film’s benevolent patriarch. But our excitement over these young heroines belies their enduring paucity. And if we’re delighted over the representation of sassy, brave girls—if we’re still registering them as novelties and dazzling exceptions—it emphasizes the extent to which American popular culture continues to proffer an idealized version of young femininity as white, docile, and amiably stifled (Moana, after all, is one of the only nonwhite heroines Disney offers its viewers).
Read more…