The Longreads Blog

Jia Tolentino Remembers the Books She Started and the Books She Shelved

Photo by tuxxilla

At final count, the manuscript was three hundred and six pages and almost seventy-eight thousand words long. There were fifteen chapters, all of which I’d edited several dozen times. In retrospect, that seems sensible—what you’d want to do, when a book was concerned—and also insane, as I don’t remember any of it. Editing is a fugue state; the time self-erases. I’d have forgotten about it altogether except for the fact that the weight of the effort has lifted only gradually, and also, the fact that the evidence is two clicks away: the evolution of an idea from nothing to something to nothing again sits peacefully in a folder named “Novel!” that I dragged off my desktop early in the fall.

At The Awl, Jia Tolentino looks back at the two novels she started but never finished, and what she learned about writing.

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Reading Lolita in Patriarchy: Rebecca Solnit on Being Mansplained About How She Must Have Misread Nabokov

Rebecca Solnit
Photo by shawncalhoun

It isn’t a fact universally acknowledged that a person who mistakes his opinions for facts may also mistake himself for God. This can happen if he’s been insufficiently exposed to the fact that there are also other people who have other experiences, and that they too were created equal, with certain inalienable rights, and that consciousness thing that is so interesting and troubling is also going on inside their heads. This is a problem straight white men suffer from especially, because the western world has held up a mirror to them for so long—and turns compliant women into mirrors reflecting them back twice life size, Virginia Woolf noted. The rest of us get used to the transgendering and cross-racializing of our identities as we invest in protagonists like Ishmael or Dirty Harry or Holden Caulfield. But straight white men don’t, so much. I coined a term a while ago, privelobliviousness, to try to describe the way that being the advantaged one, the represented one, often means being the one who doesn’t need to be aware and, often, isn’t. Which is a form of loss in its own way.

-At Lithub, Men Explain Things To Me author Rebecca Solnit writes about all the mansplaining she was treated to in response to her November essay, “80 Books No Woman Should Read” on the same site—itself a response to a much re-posted Esquire feature called “80 Best Books Every Man Should Read,” which includes 79 men. Most of all, men—”liberal men”—told her she misunderstood Lolita and was wrong for identifying with the young girl who’s been raped and robbed of her agency, “which made me wonder,” she writes, “if there’s a book called ‘Reading Lolita in Patriarchy.'”

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The Joy and Pain of Life with Pets

Anyone who has pets knows the alternate joys and pains of the walks, the smells, the snuggling and whining and inconvenient late-night demands, as well as the inevitable misery of their absence once they die. If crapping on the floor was a business, some of us pet-owners would be millionaires. In The Morning News, Gregory Martin writes about his relationship with his ancient cat Tess, relating his cat’s aging to human aging, and exploring what it means to have quality of life.

How many nights in a row would Tess have to pee in the bed before enough was enough? Five? Ten?

When I think about putting Tess down because she’s driving me crazy, ravaging my sleep, I can’t help but wonder: How will things go for me someday when I’m in diapers and think that Christine is my mom?

The more I think about it, the more I think that “How much are you willing to put up with?” is not the right question. Because no matter how tired I am, the answer is always: I could put up with more. Yes, I need four cups of coffee just to get going on the day. But I am not at my limit. To say so would be ridiculous. To even suggest it is to fail to recognize how many people are, actually, at their limit, or beyond it, and not because of their old cat.

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Living With Depression: A Reading List

Photo: JìD

The holiday season isn’t easy. Even the most well-adjusted person has to deal with stressful family members, strained finances, and travel logistics. Mental illness exacerbate these stressors even more. Not every story here is about depression during the holidays, specifically; I’ve interspersed my own experiences with depression, anxiety and panic disorders. I made this list for you who might be struggling with the gloom of winter (hello, seasonal affective disorder!), and for me. I took notes—in an actual notebook!—on these stories, on definitions and symptoms and experiences. “We read to know that we are not alone,” so sayeth C.S. Lewis, via William Nicholson. I want you to know that this holiday season, you are not alone. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Illustration: Wesley Allsbrook

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Longreads Best of 2015: Under-Recognized Stories

We asked all of our contributors to Longreads Best of 2015 to tell us about a story they felt deserved more recognition in 2015. Here they are. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2015: Science

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in science writing.

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Longreads Best of 2015: Investigative Reporting

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in investigative reporting.

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Lauren Kirchner
Senior Reporting Fellow at ProPublica.

The Price of Nice Nails (Sarah Maslin Nir, The New York Times)

I can’t remember another investigation that had as much widespread and immediate impact as this one. Through a year of persistent and patient reporting, Nir uncovered the ugly truth of New York’s nail salon industry: the labor exploitation, institutionalized racism, and dire health risks faced by its manicurists. It was an explosive story, but Nir told it with restraint. When this came out, everyone I knew was talking about it. Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio both pretty much immediately launched emergency task forces and investigations to address the problems Nir described. Reforms continue to roll out for salon owners who put their workers at risk.

But I noticed a subtler impact, too: some real soul-searching among New Yorkers about the ethics of indulging in cheap luxuries—for many of us, the only luxuries we can afford. A lot of readers were asking themselves, how could we have not have seen it? “We hold hands with this person for a half hour; we look into her eyes,” as Nir later put it. “I think my investigation revealed that we are not seeing them.” Read more…

Poor Excuse for Justice: A Rape Recanted, a Victim Re-victimized

He had a term for what he was about to do: “rape theater.” Deviant fantasies had gripped him since he was a kid, way back to when he had seen Jabba the Hutt enslave and chain Princess Leia. Where do you go when you’re 5 and already thinking about handcuffs? he would ask himself. He was only 8 the first time he broke into a home. It was such a rush. He had broken into more than a dozen homes since.

Now he was 30, an Army veteran — infantry, two tours in South Korea — who had enlisted in the Reserves, only he hadn’t appeared for duty in months.

In the kitchen, he went to the knife block and removed a black-handled blade from the top row, far left.

In the living room, he removed the laces from her black tennis shoes and put the shoes back. One detective later wrote in a report, “The shoes were lying next to each other near the end of the couch and the bedroom door, on the soles as if placed there (not disturbed).”

He was just being neat and orderly, the way he was with everything.

He threaded one of the shoelaces through a pair of underwear.

Then he walked to the bedroom.

-A description of a horrific attack by a serial rapist—whose victim the police refused to believe—from an in-depth investigative report by T. Christian Miller and Ken Marshall at ProPublica and The Marshall Project.

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Longreads Best of 2015: Business & Tech

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in business and tech.

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