The Longreads Blog

The Effects of Untreated PTSD on Neighborhoods Plagued by Violence

Over the past 20 years, medical researchers have found new ways to quantify the effects of the relentless violence on America’s inner cities. They surveyed residents who had been exposed to violence in cities such as Detroit and Baltimore and noticed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): nightmares, obsessive thoughts, a constant sense of danger. In a series of federally funded studies in Atlanta, researchers interviewed more than 8,000 innercity residents, most of them African-American. Two thirds of respondents said they had been violently attacked at some point in their lives. Half knew someone who had been murdered. Of the women interviewed, a third had been sexually assaulted. Roughly 30 percent of respondents had had symptoms consistent with PTSD—a rate as high or higher than that of veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Experts are only now beginning to trace the effects of untreated PTSD on neighborhoods that are already struggling with unemployment, poverty and the devastating impact of the war on drugs. Women—who are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, according to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—are more likely to show signs of anxiety and depression and to avoid places that remind them of the trauma. In children, PTSD symptoms can sometimes be misdiagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kids with PTSD may compulsively repeat some part of the trauma while playing games or drawing, have trouble in their relationships with family members, and struggle in school. “School districts are trying to educate kids whose brains are not working the way they should be working because of trauma,” says Marleen Wong, Ph.D., the former director of mental health services, crisis intervention, and suicide prevention for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Men with PTSD are more likely to have trouble controlling their anger, and to try to repress their trauma symptoms with alcohol or drugs.

— From “Black America’s Invisible Crisis,” a joint collaboration between Essence magazine and Propublica.

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Photo: Michael Le Roi

Ben Lerner on Real-Life Experiences in Fiction

BLVR: When you’re having the experiences that end up in your fiction or your poetry are you aware they might end up as literature? Like are you thinking “this is going in a book,” or do you try to oppose that tendency, saying “no, I’m going to experience this as if ‘writing’ didn’t exist to me” and then, as needed, recall the experience only in retrospect, as you’re writing?

BL: I’ve always wondered about that. Henry James claimed that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost. The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost—some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable. I guess when I’m frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I’ve tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens. I don’t think “I’m going to publish this as fiction” but I think “I’m going to tell this story to a friend” and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it’s already happened. Does everybody do this? I’ve always assumed this is a common human defense mechanism. Regardless, this is the opposite of James’ dictum, right? Because I’m trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.

-Ben Lerner, author of 10:04, in an interview with The Believer.

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What Ails Us: A Reading List About Disease

In last week’s Reading List, I wrote about Eula Biss and her new book, On Immunity: An InoculationIt is a meditation on the United States, disease, race and motherhood, using vaccination as a metaphor/catalyst. With that on my mind, this week’s list is about diseases—four essays about Ebola, Parkinson’s and more.

1. “My Mother, Parkinson’s and Our Struggle to Understand Disease.” (N. Michelle AuBuchon, Buzzfeed, July 2014)

In a combination of memoir and science writing, from her father’s careful logs to the books she reads to her ailing mother, AuBuchon comes to realize “we come from people who listen and people who believe in stories, because stories are the only thing getting them from one moment to the next.”

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Ray Bradbury on Science Fiction and the Art of What’s Possible

Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury. Photo: AP Images

Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

Ray Bradbury, in The Paris Review (2010).

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‘Two-Thirds of Publishing Is About Failure’

My boss when I worked in London—someone who’d published Booker Prize winners, remember—used to say that two-thirds of publishing is about failure. I agree with that: it’s the nature of the business. And yet publishing is an industry that keeps attracting to it, in various ways, people who want it to be two-thirds about success.

There are dozens of obstacles to any given book succeeding. If a book succeeds it always does so against the odds. The odds in one generation might relate to the fact that people would rather be watching television than reading your book. The odds in the next generation might be that they’d rather be on their computer than reading your book. Once it was that people would rather be riding a bicycle than reading your book. It doesn’t do any good to be talking, as an author or publisher, about the obstacles. There are better uses of energy, I think. Yes, we can all feel helpless and wary in this industry sometimes, but it’s better, as a publisher, to look at the ways in which e-books and Twitter and so on can help us reach new readers, rather than treating social media as an enemy to literature. At the event for emerging writers at A Public Space last night, we had a full house. How? By A Public Space and Graywolf posting about it on Facebook and Twitter. Not a single piece of paper was printed, but people came. And these were informed people—they knew who we were and what we publish. They were the appropriate audience. No one turned up to try and sell me something that does not fit our list. Through Twitter we reached exactly the right people—tuned into the right channel—within a few minutes.

-Fiona McCrae, publisher of Graywolf Press, in an interview with Jonathan Lee in Guernica.

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Photo: bcnbitsendorf, Flickr

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Nick Hornby on the Difficulty of Working as a Junior Book Critic

And this is one of the strange things about life as a junior book critic (I was more than 30, but I was definitely a junior): you spend all your life reading, but you can never take part in a conversation about books with your friends. They want to talk about the new Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan or Margaret Atwood; you haven’t got round to any of them, because nobody gives you the big books to review, and you’ve been ploughing through a 500-page first novel that shows only intermittent promise and that your friends will never embark upon, partly because you are about to tell them, in print, not to bother.

There were other reasons for stopping, too. It is uncomfortable being introduced to a writer whose work you have publicly slated, and when you are writing books of your own, that is more likely to happen, at literary festivals and parties and in BBC corridors. And in any case, writing books of your own exposes an uncomfortable truth: that even though you spend half your working life telling people how it should be done, you can’t do it yourself — or it’s not as easy as it looked, anyway.

— Nick Hornby, in The Sunday Times, on working as a junior book critic in the early ’90s and his book column for The Believer.

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Photo: Ministry of Stories

Jenny Diski on a Cancer Diagnosis and Keeping a Diary

We’d hardly got home before I said: ‘Well, I suppose I’m going to write a cancer diary.’ The only other thing I might have said was: ‘Well, I’m not going to write a cancer diary.’ Right there: a choice? I’m a writer, have been since I was small, and have earned my living at it for thirty years. I write fiction and non-fiction, but it’s almost always personal. I start with me, and often enough end with me. I’ve never been apologetic about that, or had a sense that my writing is ‘confessional’. What else am I going to write about but how I know and don’t know the world? I may not make things up in fiction, or tell the truth in non-fiction, but documentary or invented, it’s always been me at the centre of the will to put descriptions out into the world. I lie like all writers but I use my truths as I know them in order to do so.

— Jenny Diski in The London Review of Books on discovering that she has inoperable cancer and publicly writing about it.

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Photo: Suki Dhanda

Meet the Team That Tennis Pros Pay $40K a Year to String Their Racquets

During matches, Federer changes racquets each time the balls are changed, which happens after the first seven games and then every nine games thereafter. Nine racquets would be more than sufficient to see him through his opening match. The already strung rackets were arranged in a row against a dresser. Each had a small piece of white tape on its throat indicating the day it had been strung and the level of string tension. Federer had texted Yu the night before with his specifications: he had asked for three racquets to be strung at twenty-six kilos (“Roger wants it in kilos, not pounds,” Ferguson explained), five at 26.5, and one at twenty-seven. Spools of racquet string and rolls of grip tape were strewn across the dresser.

Yu, who was dressed in khaki shorts, a light-blue T-shirt, and sandals, was working at one of the four Babolat Star 4 stringing machines that he and Ferguson had brought to New York (they have two other stringers working with them during the Open). Although the Star 4 dates back to the nineteen-eighties and is no longer in production, they continue to use it because it is light and easy to travel with. “Once these break down, we’re retiring,” Yu joked, as he ran a strand of natural-gut string through the top of the racquet head (Federer was using natural gut for the sixteen main strings and polyester for the nineteen cross strings). After Yu finished, he clipped ten tiny plastic string savers into the string bed of each racquet. Federer likes the string savers because they supposedly reduce friction. Yu, who estimates that he has strung racquets more than five thousand times for Federer, is skeptical. “I don’t think it does much,” he said. “But these guys don’t like to change things,” Ferguson added. After punching in the string savers, Yu stencilled a red Wilson logo on each racquet, wrapped them individually in long plastic bags, sealed the bags with blue tape, then stuck a large decal bearing Federer’s logo (a stylized “RF”) on each bag.

— Michael Steinberger in a post for The New Yorker, on Priority 1, the stringing and racquet customization company that is used by tennis pros like Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. The players pay $40,000 a year for the service.

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Photo: Edwin Martinez

Joan Rivers: 1933-2014

Joan Rivers, comedy legend, has died at age 81. Three stories from the Longreads Archive:

The Fresh Air Interview: Joan Rivers (Terry Gross, NPR)

GROSS: So, like, that’s kind of a paradox to me that you live to be on stage and at the same time, there’s this dread of being on stage.

Ms. RIVERS: Not a dread of being on stage, a dread of not doing well, of disappointing them. I you know, I always you think I have one friend who’s a very good, very, very famous comedian, comic, who once said to me: I give them five minutes. If they don’t like me, I go on automatic.

And I thought: They have bought the tickets, they have paid for a babysitter, they have come out to see you. They want to have fun. I want them to walk out of a show and say, that’s the best show I’ve ever seen.

I fight to the end. I worry to the end, worry are they having a good time?

 

Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny (Jonathan Van Meter, New York magazine, 2010)

At the age of 76, it seems, she has been rediscovered. Much of it has to do with a new documentary about her life, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which opens in theaters on June 11. Roger Ebert wrote, in one of the film’s many rave reviews, that it is “one of the most truthful documentaries about show business I’ve seen. Also maybe the funniest.” The film comes at the end of a remarkable year for Rivers, one that began when she won The Celebrity Apprentice (after one of the uglier reality-TV showdowns), outfoxing all those bimbos, has-beens, and two-bit poker players to emerge—somehow—as the sympathetic character. At long last, not fired! It’s unfamiliar territory for Rivers: to be the one people root for.

 

The Playboy Interview: Joan Rivers (1986)

I didn’t realize what a liberated lady I was. I always said, “My life is liberated. Leave me alone. I have no time to join a movement, because I am the movement.” I didn’t have time to go up to anyone and say, “Go out and make it in a man’s world.” I just said, “Look at me and you can see what I’m doing.” I never wanted to say that because I was a woman, things were harder for me or I was judged separately. It took two incidents — my book and this business about leaving the Carson show — to turn me around. With my book, as I said, women seem to understand it more than men. And when I left The Tonight Show, I got such good wishes, such support from women. I didn’t realize how nice it was that women were behind what I did. It’s wonderful.