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Wrestling With the Truth

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich | The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir | Flatiron Books | May 2017 | 22 minutes (6,102 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the first four chapters of The Fact of a Body, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s gripping hybrid memoir of a murder case and family secrets. Blending crime reportage with first-person narrative of her own struggles, the braided story wrestles with trauma, violence, and the ways we try to understand the past, especially when those we trust betray us. Our thanks to Marzano-Lesnevich and Flatiron for sharing it with the Longreads community.

Note: This work is not authorized or approved by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center or its clients, and the views expressed by the author do not reflect the views or positions of anyone other than the author. The author’s description of any legal proceedings, including her description of the positions of the parties and the circumstances and events of the crimes charged, are drawn solely from the court record, other publicly available information, and her own research.

One

Louisiana, 1992

The boy wears sweatpants the color of a Louisiana lake. Later, the police report will note them as blue, though in every description his mother gives thereafter she will always insist on calling them aqua or teal. On his feet are the muddy hiking boots every boy wears in this part of the state, perfect for playing in the woods. In one small fist, he grips a BB gun half as tall as he is. The BB gun is the Daisy brand, with a long, brown plastic barrel the boy keeps as shiny as if it were real metal. The only child of a single mother, Jeremy Guillory is used to moving often, sleeping in bedrooms that aren’t his. His mother’s friends all rent houses along the same dead-end street the landlord calls Watson Road whenever he wants to charge higher rent, though it doesn’t really have a name and even the town police department will need directions to find it. Settlers from Iowa named the town after their home state but, wanting a fresh start, pronounced the name Io-way, even as they kept the spelling. The town has always been a place people come for new starts, always been a place they can’t quite leave the past behind. There, the boy and his mother stay with whoever can pay the electricity bill one month, whoever can keep the gas on the next. Wherever the boy lands, he takes his BB gun with him. It is his most prized possession.

Now it is the first week in February. The leaves are green and lush on the trees, but the temperature dips at night. Lorilei, Jeremy’s mother, isn’t working. She rented a home just for the two of them—their first—but the electricity’s been turned off. Her brother Richard lives in a sprawling house up on the hill, but she isn’t staying with Richard. Instead, Lorilei and Jeremy are staying with Lorilei’s friend Melissa, Melissa’s boyfriend, Michael, and their baby. The baby is two years old, old enough that he wants to play with the boy and screams when he doesn’t get his way.

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Young African Artists Lead Nuanced Conversation about Race in America

(Photo by Paul Marotta/Getty Images)

For the New York Times, Taiye Selasi profiles novelist Yaa Gyasi and visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, both African-born, Alabama-raised creatives who’ve won critical acclaim for incisive work that probes deeply into the meaning of race in America.

“Drawing was always my thing,” Ojih Odutola says. “I always signed up for competitions. I won a lot of first-place prizes, but I was very traditional in my renderings.” Her parents lauded her gift but viewed art as a hobby. It was Dana Bathurst, a high school art teacher, who challenged their assumptions: that good art must approximate European traditions and that pursuing a career in art wasn’t possible. Bathurst introduced Ojih Odutola to a new conception of portraiture through the work of African-American artists like Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden and fellow Alabamian Kerry James Marshall. Gyasi, similarly, excelled at writing from an early age but couldn’t imagine a literary career before AP English. That year, the only black English teacher she would ever have, Janice Vaughn, took her writing seriously. Then, in her senior year, Gyasi discovered Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” The language was spectacular; the author a brown woman; the sensibility familiar, Southern.

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Millennial to Millionaire: Stop Blaming Avocado Toast for Why We’re Not Buying Houses

Photo Credit: T.Tseng/Flickr

Millennials rarely get a fair shake when it comes to, well, anything written about them, which is why it isn’t surprising to see a misguided post from TIME magazine today blaming the low rate of home ownership among millennials on their apparently voracious appetite for avocado toast.

“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” millionaire Tim Gurner says, also blaming millennials’ annual trips to Europe every year as the reason why they can’t afford to buy homes.

He continues, “The people that own homes today worked very, very hard for it, saved every dollar, did everything they could to get up the property investment ladder,” conveniently failing to mention the housing bubble and subsequent crash that occurred in the last decade due to poorly regulated banks that approved mortgages for millions of people who they knew could not afford to pay them back. For Gurner, it’s easier to blame rampant spending on avocados and lattes for today’s low home ownership rates than on post-recession regulation of predatory lending practices that have prevented banks from handing out mortgages like candy.

Guess what, Gurner: According to the New York Times, Federal Reserve data shows that the percentage of Americans under 35 who hold credit card debt has fallen to its lowest level since 1989, the year Taylor Swift was born into this world. If millennials are having trouble controlling their spending, the data does not show it. Read more…

Viral, Yet Ephemeral: Death On Your Cellphone

a cellphone screen with a collection of social networking app icons
Image by Microsiervos (CC BY 2.0)

Writing in Real Life magazine, Juli Min explores the way WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app, has become a place to both mourn death and share graphic videos of the moment itself—a place where users post “viral videos of death as we create an endless stream of idle gossip.” What does this mean broadly, and what does it mean in a country where all data is subject to government monitoring?

Tencent WeChat accounts, like Facebook accounts, are technically leased to their users. The data and photos do not belong solely to individuals in the end, as Tencent maintains the rights to copy, use, and forward whatever is shared on the platform. Accordingly, Tencent’s servers themselves are leased from the Chinese government, subjecting all messaging data to government monitoring and surveillance. A viral video of a mother’s death by escalator will happily make the rounds, whereas a video of a Tibetan monk burning himself in protest will be shuttered by government monitors — “we” are allowed to gawk at the spectacle of death, but not the spectacle of resistance. In 1967’s The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, prescient founder of the Situationist International, wrote: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Aside from the work of mediation, he wrote, spectacle also allowed for the proliferation and control of the masses and degraded authentic life and experience.

Monitoring is both the source and the function of internet spectacle.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by Eric Charbonneau / Invision for Warner Bros. / AP Images)

This week we’re sharing stories by Caity Weaver, Matthew Desmond, Chris J. Rice, Kent Russell, and Rafe Bartholomew.

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A Life Measured in Swipe-Rights

Graffiti on the sidewalk reading "i saw you on tinder"
Image by liborious (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Andrew Kay found himself on the dating market and the academic job market simultaneously, and spoiler alert: they’re deeply analogous, and it turns out that living both the personal and professional parts of your life as one massive interview is not easy, or pleasant. He takes us through the whole stressful, performative, soul-deadening process in The Point magazine — the piece is long, but the candor makes it compelling.

You craft a digital avatar of yourself and send it out into the virtual world, then spend the ensuing months and years honing and revising it; you rehearse behind closed doors again and again, giving yourself forcible makeovers until your behavior, your tics—I almost said your inner being, though this last remains up in the air, a thing you gradually learn not to think about—correspond with the simulacrum. On OkCupid and Tinder, I was “a chill, big-hearted guy,” family-centered, mild-mannered, humorously self-deprecating. In my cover letter I was a young scholar and teacher of luminous promise—bold, theoretically omnivorous, a winner of fellowships and awards, an author of multiple articles with a first book in the pipeline and a second germinating. The process is exhausting: neither in bathroom nor bedroom are you free from it, devouring dating profiles on the toilet, reaching for your cell phone when you accidentally wake at 3 a.m., checking the jobs Wiki from the parking lot outside the gym. At last you crawl, parched and ragged, to the reservoirs of intimate encounter, thinking here at last you can abandon the pretension and performance, here forget and enjoy yourself—only to learn that the performance and assessment have merely begun.

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Dwayne Johnson Is Everything Our President Isn’t

(Photo by Eric Charbonneau / Invision for Warner Bros. / AP Images)

Dwayne Johnson smashed through the great wall of news this week, rushing over and lifting us up in a powerful but tender overhead press, carrying us toward the dreamland he lives in where everyone is hardworking, great-looking, and nice as hell.

Bless GQ for sending Caity Weaver on the enviable mission to profile Dwayne Johnson, and for their art department for thinking what we’re all thinking: If a celebrity had to be president, wooing the electorate with charm and charisma, why not elect Johnson, who appears to excel in every area our current president lacks?

Evan Osnos recently reported that “other than golf, [Trump] considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.” A finite amount of energy? Dwayne Johnson is a solar-powered, clean running beast of infinite energy and charisma.

If you are a child, good luck getting past Dwayne Johnson without a high five or some simulated roughhousing; if you’re in a wheelchair, prepare for a Beowulf-style epic poem about your deeds and bravery, composed extemporaneously, delivered to Johnson’s Instagram audience of 85 million people; if you’re dead, having shuffled off your mortal coil before you even got the chance to meet Dwayne Johnson, that sucks—rest in peace knowing that Dwayne Johnson genuinely misses you. For Johnson, there are no strangers; there are simply best friends, and best friends he hasn’t met yet.

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The Portrait of an Artist Who Flattered Donald Trump

A Ralph Wolfe Cowan portrait of Elvis in the National Portrait Gallery (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Unless you’re a millionaire or a member of a royal family, you might not have heard of painter Ralph Wolfe Cowan, but if you’ve seen a picture of the Donald Trump portrait that hangs in Mar-a-Lago, you know his work. For Oxford American, Nicole Pasulka spent a weekend with the Maestro, visited Mar-a-Lago to see his handiwork in situ, and learned the basics of the kind of celebrity flattery that lets an artist charge a cool quarter-million per portrait.

When Cowan was a boy in Portsmouth, Virginia, his three brothers would go see cowboy movies on Saturdays. He chose the Technicolor musicals showing across the street instead. From an early age, he found that portraiture was the perfect way to combine his passions for painting and celebrity. “I used to love going to the movies and seeing Maureen O’Hara in all these pirate movies and the big ships,” he told me. “I said, one of these days I was going to grow up and meet all these people and paint their portraits—and I did.”

In the 1950s he painted Debbie Reynolds in casual attire and Liz Taylor in white silk pajamas. The three of them would hang out together in Miami Beach, Los Angeles, and New York City before Taylor ran off with Reynolds’s husband, Eddie Fisher. Cowan wanted to paint Betty Grable, but he says by the time he met her she couldn’t afford it. Elvis paid for his eight-foot-tall portrait with $10,000 in cash and carried it home before the paint was dry. When country singer Kenny Rogers was newly divorced and feeling unsexy, Cowan painted him in a coat that concealed his waistline “and I put a big dick down there,” he said.

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For Caregivers from the Philippines, the Israeli Dream Is Fragile

Rose Fostanes won X-Factor Israel in 2014; two years later, she had to leave the country when her visa expired. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

In colloquial Hebrew, the word filipinit — a woman from the Philippines — is no longer a simple demonym; Filipinas have dominated the eldercare sector in Israel for so long that it has become a generic term for “caregiver.” In the New York Times Magazine, Ruth Margalit explores the stories of precariously employed women and the complicated bonds of co-dependence and isolation that form between them and the elderly for whom they provide care. Along the way, she revisits a recent episode that highlighted the fragile status of Filipinas in Israel: Rose Fostanes won the local version of The X Factor in 2014, only to be forced out of the country two years later, as soon as her visa expired.

In 2013, the Filipino community in Israel came under an unexpected spotlight when Rose Fostanes, a 46-year-old Filipino caregiver, auditioned for the Israeli version of the singing competition “The X Factor.” A short video clip aired before Fostanes’s performance, mentioning that she lived in South Tel Aviv with three other caregivers: “I love my job because I like to take care of old people,” Fostanes said. The clip drew knowing chuckles from the audience. Short and plump, in a green shirt and jeans, Fostanes represented the unlikely, diamond-in-the-rough heroine audiences love to embrace. Her rendition of Shirley Bassey’s “This Is My Life” became a national sensation; more than half of all Israeli households tuned in to watch her win the season’s finale. But the praise she received was tinged with condescension: She was shown offering to make a sandwich for the supermodel Bar Refaeli, the show’s host, and the judges kept saying how “proud” they were of her.

After the show ended, Fostanes was supposed to land a lucrative record contract, and she quit her job as caregiver. But her first single failed to sell, and her management company later dropped her. Last year, after a protracted legal battle over her visa status, she returned to the Philippines, where she now makes a living performing in small bars and clubs across Manila. “She got tired of chasing her dream,” a friend of hers, Winston Santos, told me.

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The Real Obama: An Interview with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographer David J. Garrow

Author photo by David Rubin.

Cody Delistraty | Longreads | May 2017 | 12 minutes (3,333 words)

 

There are few subjects in contemporary history who deserve a 1,400-page biography, but Barack Obama’s ascendance to the presidency merits every word. Deeply researched over nine years — with over a thousand interviews and many never-before-seen documents — David J. Garrow’s Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama covers 44’s life to date: his youth in Hawaii and Indonesia, community organizing in Illinois, his impressive work as a Harvard Law student, and his pursuit of politics as a profession in Chicago. All the while, Garrow shows, Obama was both being shaped and thoughtfully crafting himself, turning himself from the bright, jocular kid at Punahou School in Hawaii into one of the most revolutionary, exciting presidents of the modern era.

Garrow is a Professor of Law and History, and a Distinguished Faculty Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a Ph.D. from Duke University, and has written several nonfiction books, including Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Bearing the Cross.

His latest book has already been compared to Robert Caro’s history of Lyndon Johnson, but Garrow’s Obama biography seems to go even further: two hundred pages of footnotes, conversations with seemingly every vital person in Obama’s life, and a nonpartisan perspective that will no doubt open the floodgates of interpretation.

I spoke with Garrow recently, and it’s clear he’s a born interviewer; he began asking me questions about my own life, until, finally, I steered us toward a wide-ranging, exceptionally in-depth conversation in which we discussed Obama’s coming-of-age, influences, formative experiences, shifting personality, the significance of friends and family, and how he eventually understood his own legacy and the arc of his grand personality.

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