Search Results for: The Nation

It’s Never Too Late to Apologize

Hindudstan Times/Getty Images Justin Bieber asks, “Is it too late now to say sorry?” Longreads says, “Better late than never!”

Taking criticism is hard. Lately, it appears especially hard for writers who are also on Twitter, which is many — maybe even most — writers.

Earlier this week, New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss tweeted a video of American Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu landing a triple axel. Nagasu was the first American to ever achieve this at the Olympics — a huge feat. Weiss appended her tweet with a reference to Hamilton: “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

Twitter users were quick to point out that Nagasu is not an immigrant. Her parents are Japanese immigrants, but she was born in California and held dual citizenship until she was 22. (Also, the lyric in Miranda’s song is phrased “Immigrants: we get the job done.”) To the first correction, Weiss claimed she knew that fact, but she was taking “poetic license.” In a vacuum, Weiss’ tweet is a misstep, but not unforgivable. The desire to celebrate Nagasu is good, referencing Hamilton is good. But in the context of her work and public statements, the implicit assumption that someone non-white, with an “ethnic” name, was automatically an immigrant rubbed people the wrong way.

Rather than considering this point, Weiss lashed out. She claimed she deleted the tweet after “being told I am a racist, a ghoul and that I deserve to die.” A cursory look through her mentions showed no evidence supporting this claim, but women are attacked on the internet regularly and virulently, so it’s possible people had taken to email with particularly galling attacks.

But this claim that being criticized, and corrected, is akin to being “silenced” is becoming a common theme of late. People are responding to criticism as though it is some sort of form of torture. Katie Roiphe, a professional critic, dislikes being criticized so much that she responds by accusing her critics of being “low-level secret policemen in a new totalitarian state.” Weiss believes that when she is criticized, it is “another sign of civilization’s end.”

If I were Roiphe, I might deem these reactions “hysterical” but I dislike the gendered connotations of that word. Men who balk at “political correctness” have been reacting this way for years. Any criticism of their behavior or their opinions is galling, is somehow an attempt to erase them off the face of the earth. “We have a right to free speech!” they shout, but what they really want is a right to be free from criticism, from reflection, from having to think about the experiences of anyone other than themselves.

It is an interesting form of entitlement, this belief that criticism is an infringement on some fundamental right. As Rebecca Traister pointed out in a recent essay for The Cut, published after Roiphe’s much-hyped contra-#MeToo essay in Harper’s, it is “a tic of the powerful… mistaking the right to speech for the right to unquestioned authority.”

In a recent issue of n+1, Dayna Tortorici wrote of this same phenomenon, time-pegging it to the end of 2014: “The right to free speech under the First Amendment had been recast in popular discourse as the right to free speech without consequence, without reaction.”

This is, it should be obvious, not a right that any government or other entity ensures. Alexis Grenell wrote about this last September in a column in the New York Daily News touting the value of “shame speech,” and “the soft power of shame.”

“The First Amendment only protects freedom of expression; there is no right to be heard, or respected,” Grenell explains. “The state of shame is made possible by thousands of people of different backgrounds finally having their voices heard.”

While writers like Roiphe and Weiss are still the ones getting platforms in publications like Harper’s and The New York Times, the internet — that great equalizer — is facilitating this “state of shame.” Twitter might be overrun by Nazis, white supremacists, and angry basement-dwellers making rape and death threats, but it has also increasingly become a place where marginalized voices are able to make themselves heard.

Some people hate that. People you wouldn’t expect! Just this week, Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter at the New York Times, appeared to be so moved watching the teens who survived the school shooting in Florida this week speak on television, he tweeted, “Impressive how articulate and well-educated these kids are from this school. Obviously a good school. Another sad reason for yesterday’s events.”

More than 200 people replied to his tweet, pointing out how hurtful his words were, so Lipton attempted a clarification, “And not saying it would be less sad it [sic] there were poor kids, obviously. Just such a waste to see kids with so much opportunity before them wiped out.” More than a thousand people responded to that one, which anyone who spends any time on Twitter could have predicted.

After a few hours, he deleted those tweets, and wrote a new one. “I deleted an earlier tweet that was misread by many people. What I was saying was not meant to me [sic] disrespectful. Sorry it was read that way.”

This type of reaction is so common, and it confounds me. It is so, so much easier to listen, see that you’ve hurt people (usually people with less institutional and systemic power than you), and say sorry. Then it all goes away!

Bret Stephens, a colleague of Weiss’ in the opinion section at the Times, who seems to live for the thrill of being a bogeyman contrarian, came to Lipton’s defense.

The last line is a reference to the fact that Stephens dislikes criticism so much, he keeps threatening to leave Twitter but then fails to do so.

Opinion writers, in particular, should be able to handle criticism better, given their job is to criticize — and, at their best, honestly and diligently examine different ideas in good faith.

This week, NYT opinion editor James Bennet issued a 1,500-word memo in defense of Bari Weiss, insisting that she, and everyone else in his stable, are operating in good faith. The way he described the opinion section is exactly what its critics want it to be, and what they feel it’s falling short of achieving:

[W]e owe our readers an honest struggle over the right paths ahead, not a pretense that we’re in possession of God’s own map.

That means being willing to challenge our own assumptions; it means being open to counter-arguments even as we advance our own convictions; it means listening to voices that we may object to and even sometimes find obnoxious, provided they meet the same tests of intellectual honesty, respect for others and openness. It means taking on the toughest arguments on the other side, not the straw men. It means starting from a presumption of good faith, particularly on the part of our colleagues, including those we disagree with. It means having some humility about the possibility that, in the end, the other side might have a point, or more than one.

Bennet! Bennet. This is exactly what we are asking you, and Stephens, and Weiss to do. This is all we want! Take your critics seriously. Don’t dismiss them as too stupid or “insane” to understand your point. You are writers. You are writers of opinion, which ultimately means you are rhetoricians, so your goal is to persuade. If people are arguing with you, it means you have fallen short of that goal. Engage with them! Start from a presumption of good faith! And please, please think about why you think that presumption is owed “particularly” to people who work for the Times, not to those who read it, and love it enough to try to push you to be better.

Bennet’s memo was written after an internal Slack chat was leaked, showing NYT employees frustrated both by Weiss’ tweet and her entitled self-defense earlier this week. One anonymous employee wrote:

i wasn’t here when we had a public editor, but i understand how it worked. it was clear. what i don’t understand now and now what’s unclear is what’s supposed to happen when the same mistakes keep getting made again and again. at what point is the company willing to take the responsibility off the public for calling this stuff out? will the reader center step in? is that even what the reader center is for? i genuinely don’t know!

What seems to be obvious both to us readers and internally at the Times is that the Reader Center is not living up to the legacy of the public editor. As I’ve mentioned previously, I wrote NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan in 2014 — around the time Tortorici references in her essay, when this outcry about the audacity of plebeian critics surfaced. I was frustrated about three separate instances when NYT writers had been criticized for insensitive language and responded by pooh-poohing an uptight, uncomprehending Twitterati. (Sullivan was at the time working on a column in response to the latest incident — Alessandra Stanley referring to Shonda Rhimes as an “angry black woman” — but it was also in the wake of a column about Ray Rice that used florid language to describe his spousal abuse, and the infamous Mike Brown “no angel” article.) The writers were, similarly to Weiss, defending their perceived “right” to use the language they want without considering the impact it would have on readers, and vulnerable readers in particular.

I wrote the following to Sullivan at the time, and I still believe it today:

Journalism does not occur in a vacuum. When your artful words are sent out into the world, they have the power to hurt people who are particularly vulnerable.

That these articles get past not only a writer but — I assume — multiple editors without one person stopping to think about the effects the language will have, not in their stylistic quality, but in their existence in the world of readers who may be victims of violence or domestic violence or systemic discrimination and racism, is absurd.

Pretty writing is not more important than empathy and respect for people with less power and less of an ability to have their voices heard.

The problem here is not Twitter. It is a culture in which a writer can receive criticism from people their writing has harmed, and respond not with a gracious, empathetic apology, but with the dismissive arrogance it must take to claim that anyone who disagrees with you just isn’t smart enough to understand your point.

If Bennet wants people to assume his writers are operating in good faith, they need to show that. For now, Weiss has shown exactly the opposite, both in her work (as when she claimed the motto of contemporary feminism is “Believe All Women” or reductively cited a vague Instagram post in a claim of a black activist’s anti-police bias), and this week’s dustup. Tom Scocca outlined this well on — of course — Twitter:

Here’s the thing. Weiss, Stephens, and Roiphe claim they want a gentler, kinder discourse. That’s a good goal. It can be exhausting to be patient in the face of microaggressions, especially for people who have been on the receiving end of them for so long. But if we can muster it, I have no doubt it will lead to a better discourse.

The flipside of that, though, is that Weiss, Stephens, Roiphe et al need to come down from their mountain and actually listen to and consider the criticism leveled against them. They have to try to be better right along with the rest of us.

The Great Stink

CSA Images/Mod Art Collection

Laurie Penny | Longreads | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4270 words)

My heart goes out to men right now. Actually, my heart goes out to all sorts of unsavory places these days, no matter how much I warn it. My heart goes out to men most nights, wearing precarious outfits, no doubt getting exactly what it deserves. It brings back stories.

In the past weeks and months I’ve spent a lot of time sitting across tables from men who have been accused of sexual assault and rape — men who are angry, and afraid, and have no idea what to do now. Men for whom the fast-changing code of sexual and romantic conduct is not the most immediate problem: theirs is that they have been called out, condemned, and are wondering what the next months and years of their lives are going to look like. And in their bitterness I can hear a backlash coming down the tracks.

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Hierarchy of Needs

(Severin Matusek / EyeEm)

Angela Palm | Creative Nonfiction | Winter 2017 | 10 minutes (2,732 words)

“You never laugh anymore,” my seven-year-old said from the backseat of the car while I was driving. It was early November.

“What did you say?” I asked, though I had heard him clearly.

* * *

I had been thinking about what it meant that Donald Trump had not yet stopped running for president. About the errands we still had to do that night. About the balance of my credit card, and about our new mortgage and all the furniture I couldn’t afford to fill the new house. About the cost of my kids’ college. About the most recent school shooting and the new statistic I’d read that said Americans in 21 states are more likely to die a gun-related death than as a result of a car accident. About heroin overdoses and prescription pill addictions that were hitting closer and closer to home. Food insecurity. Black lives and deaths in America. Overpopulation. Prison overcrowding. The Syrian refugee crisis. Global warming. Dying oceans. My aging parents, and my own mortality. E-mail that had gone unanswered for months because I was simply tired of typing. The state of my marriage. The quality of my teaching. The exercise I wasn’t getting.

If my brain were a computer, its internal fan would make that loud, warm, whirring sound that means it’s working too hard. It probably isn’t a coincidence that adult coloring books topped Amazon’s bestseller lists last year.

* * *

I wash my body each day with liquid soap I squeeze from a bottle that reads “happiness.” I buy this product again and again to no noticeable effect and keep quiet faith in the power of the subliminal.

If that power exists, then it follows that I am also subconsciously affected by the sponsored ads on Facebook. Should I buy that period underwear? I find myself wondering several times in a single day. No, no.

* * *

The most basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are physiological ones: air, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion of waste. Eating, fucking, snoozing, shitting. Happiness is not listed among any of the hierarchy’s tiered descriptions, but I imagine it floats somewhere above the uppermost point of the two-dimensional pyramid or surrounds the diagram’s boundaries like a cloud. Perhaps it appears intermittently as each level of the hierarchy clicks into place, and flickers out of focus again when the pyramid fluctuates. Or maybe it is measured differently altogether.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula.

Our independence, says the Declaration of Independence, guarantees a right to pursue happiness and bypasses the needs in Maslow’s hierarchy entirely. Though the document assures life and liberty in imprecise, yet enthusiastic terms, it cites no explicit guarantee of basic needs such as drinkable water or fresh air. Those are assumed here. For now.

I have everything in Maslow’s ground-floor level of needs, some things in the upper levels of needs, and many things that aren’t needs at all. But this assumes happiness relies on having as opposed to being.

* * *

Echoing Tolstoy’s assertion about happy families in Anna Karenina, a therapist wrote that unhappy people have vastly different reasons for being unhappy, but happy people all have one thing in common: They are grateful for what they have rather than being obsessed with what they want.

Through product messaging, I’ve come to believe soap might have the power to make me happy. A pill might make me happy. Stylish clothes might make me happy. Make-up. Skiing. Validation from the strangers of the Internet. Alcohol. Weight loss. Botox. Period underwear.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula. An Amazon search turns up over 92,000 books that focus on the subject. In 2008, a woman named Robyn Okrant embarked on a mission to live for a year according to Oprah Winfrey’s advice on happiness. Okrant changed her sex, her food, her clothing, her makeup, her philanthropic methods, and more. In a Forbes Magazine interview she says of the experience: “It was incredibly draining, and it made me really sad. It made me sad to think of how many hours I’ve lost — even when I wasn’t doing the project — to blindly following advice and listening to what other people tell me I should be doing to create my own happiness.”

* * *

Do you know how easy it is to mask unhappiness? Add exclamation points. That is how I text my mother: I’m great! Can’t wait for the holidays!

* * *

This past fall, Thanksgiving came and went quickly. Before my brother and his girlfriend flew back home, we spent a small fortune on lunch together at a trendy brick oven pizzeria and brewery. While we waited for our food to arrive, I heard a man at the table to my right tell another man about a gay bathhouse he recently visited. “The floor is covered in semen,” he said as he ate his salad. The other man nodded, his expression neutral and joyless. I imagined a place where men empty themselves into and around each other, and I mentally classified it as a combination of a fulfilled basic need and the freedom to pursue happiness.

To my left, beyond my brother, a large flat screen television broadcasted a continuous live video feed of a Ugandan village’s water pump, which the pizzeria had funded. I was the only person in the restaurant who watched it for longer than a few seconds. Between bites of thin crust pizza topped with speck and Brussels sprouts, I saw a young boy in red t-shirt carry a plastic jug to the pump and fill it. I saw a barefoot girl toddle across the screen, then bend over to rake her hands across the ground, her face placid and oblivious to the camera. A man crossed the screen somberly and approached the pump, filling his two jugs. Then a woman filled her jugs.

Beyond the pump was a row of homes. A telephone pole rose above them, presumably delivering electricity to the village from an unseen source beyond the camera’s lens. The area in view was free from debris, free from conflict, and nothing I could see in this tiny slice of rural Uganda echoed the violence of a twenty-year civil war. I was unsure whether to take this a sign of recovery, as I only saw what I saw, and nothing more. But whatever the context, this village remained. It moved me, though I could not articulate exactly why.

For a moment, I coveted the simplicity the live feed seemed to depict. I don’t really want to live in a world where lunch for four costs $100 and restaurant staff refills my glass more often than I need, where emotions are advertised as bath soap and adult coloring books are offered as tools for unburdening our saturated minds, but here I am.

During the 43 minutes or so that I witnessed their lives from the comparable extravagance of my own, none of the Ugandans that passed before the camera laughed, but none cried either. They drew their water from the well, and then they returned to their homes, aligned on either side of a narrow road, to clean and cook and live. I wondered whether they knew they were being watched by relatively well off and overwhelmingly white people in Vermont, day after day, and whether the cost of that water was their exploitation and subjection to an American pizzeria’s marketing plan during the restaurant’s business hours. Altruism doesn’t need a camera. Neither do the thirsty.

Carl Sagan said that there are no dumb questions, but I read an article that went one step farther. It said that happy people all ask dumb questions. Here’s one: who is the camera for, then?

* * *

Over Thanksgiving break, I graded my creative writing class’ personal essays and memoirs. Their nonfiction writing revealed wide-ranging pursuits of happiness and setbacks along the way. I never said, “Write about how you struggle,” but they did. Three women battled eating disorders. One of those three was also a cutter whose words about blood sloshing from her wrists read like intimate correspondence with a lover.

(Recently, I read a suicide prevention handbill that said the term committed suicide was offensive. Died by suicide is the preferred term. I made a mental note to remember that. But what is the appropriate term for a person who enjoys hurting themselves? Who obsesses over the color of blood and loves the pain associated with extracting it from her own veins? Who, for reasons I will never comprehend, cuts herself in pursuit of happiness?)

There were two other women whose mothers had died too young. Another student’s chronic illness forced her to withdraw from school. One young woman wrote mainly about other people’s heroin use, others’ sexual abuse, as though she was recasting a truth she couldn’t quite admit as her own. All semester, I cheered silently for her.

A young man with autism recently came out of the closet and didn’t want to be called brave for that. Another young man with ADHD was allowed, by the grace of a formal accommodation, to leave the room and use his phone whenever he felt like it. He employed this choice only when he became frustrated with the less talented writers in the class. At times, I wanted to walk out with him.

A young woman wrote a chronicle of her meaningless tattoos, detailing how being able to get inked up for no reason makes her happy. She ended her essay with the line, “This skull, if you have to believe it stands for something, means I’m dead inside.”

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them.

One young man couldn’t be bothered to do the classwork I assigned. He assumed I’d let it slide without consequence. “I’m just really into dance right now,” he said when I asked why he wasn’t doing the work — not any of it. “Are you sure my grade is right?” he asked after grades were posted.

I need an extension, they said. I need you to repeat the assignment requirements, they said. I need an electronic reminder for homework or it won’t get done, they said. I’m overwhelmed, they said. They cried when printers jammed and when they were late to class. They cried when they were given an earned poor grade. They would write me to tell me their weekend was “just too much” and they wouldn’t be able to haul themselves into the classroom.

They would stare at me like guppies, open-mouthed, waiting to be fed, and I would often have the wrong kind of nourishment. I’d read articles about trigger warnings and about millennial attitudes and about millennial parents and millennial fear of failure and low tolerance for stress, and I still couldn’t completely formulate a way to educate them effectively.

They were happiest when I brought food to class.

* * *

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them. During the prior semester alone, there had been seven shootings on American college campuses. Just after the Thanksgiving break, the following headlines populated my Facebook feed:

“Your Opinion on Gun Control Doesn’t Matter” (Daily Kos)

“‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” (The Onion)

“On Guns, We’re Not Even Trying” (The New York Times)

Toward the end of the semester, I had been stumbling about my house, talking nonsensically to myself instead of writing or grading. “Refrigerator. Frigerator. Fridge,” I said while walking through the kitchen. Then, as I entered my office, fragments from Horace’s Ars poetica: in medias res. Ab ovo. Which mean, respectively, “into the middle of things” and “from the beginning.” The poet never implied that endings exist. Only that poetry is somehow perpetually on its way from one understanding to another, altered understanding. It is in pursuit.

* * *

Recently, I tried for the hundredth time to explain the concept of infinity to my five-year-old. “No. It has to end,” he sobbed angrily, and then stomped away.

How do we begin receding from too much? As individuals, as a generation, as a nation?

The first sign taught in baby sign language is “more.” There is no sign for “less.”

Once, the average person only had words for a handful of colors. In 1903, Crayola crayons were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and black. By 1949, there were 48 colors available; 64 by 1958; 72 by 1972; 120 by 1998. We learned more names for colors than we ever dreamed: magenta, fuchsia, copper, periwinkle, cornflower, ochre, onyx, royal blue, sienna, peach, beige. A box of eight crayons becomes 16 becomes 24 becomes 48 becomes 64 becomes 72 becomes 120. A child who has had a box of 48 crayons is never again satisfied with only 8. Or maybe they don’t know how to ask for less in a society of more.

Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

In 2003, Crayola officially added the colors inch worm, jazzberry jam, mango tango, and wild blue yonder and they retired the colors blizzard blue, magic mint, mulberry, and teal blue.

By that same year, it is estimated up to 20,000 children had been abducted and forced to enroll as soldiers in the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army.

* * *

I admit I have an adult coloring book. I limit myself to five colors for each picture to keep the process simple, but it takes forever to choose five from my kids’ 64 pack. I’m stressed before I even begin the supposedly meditative activity.

In the phenomenon referred to as Russian blues, we discriminate between colors faster when linguistic organization presorts them.

There must be more colors to discover than we have named. There must be a Crayola 286-pack in our future, containing the shades between fuchsia and magenta, cornflower and periwinkle. Or the purple that bees see in the space between yellow and ultraviolet light.

Can we want things that we do not know about?

* * *

After the semester ended, I attended a grant-funded writing residency in Massachusetts. The Cape in winter is nearly deserted. Many of the good restaurants close for the season, and a majority of the homes sit empty. I welcomed the stillness, the solitude. For a week, there was less of everything: less motion around me, fewer people with whom to interact, less to accomplish, less to buy. There was less noise, less mess without two children. Fewer distractions without Facebook and Amazon and political headlines. I had most of what I needed — food, water, shelter — and not much more. Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

I took daily, silent walks to the vacant shore, meditatively listing to myself the places and things around me named for shells. Shellpoint Apartments, Shellhouse, Shell Inn, Shell Street. Repeat. I knelt in the cold sand and looked out across the bay. I examined the lifeless things that had washed ashore, raking my hands across the ground like that Ugandan child and gathering what the sea had discarded. A peace swept over me whenever I was near to the ground. I caught myself smiling for no reason.

At the Cape, I passed hours sitting quietly, needing nothing, wanting nothing. Pursing nothing but a few more words on a page. On the final night, four friends stopped by, including a couple with their new baby. The baby laughed and I laughed and soon we were all laughing together. All the fine dining restaurants were closed, so we ate at a Ninety Nine chain restaurant and did not make polite apologies to one another for it. We squeezed into a booth for four that was too small to accommodate our group of six. A hockey game played on the television in the bar, but we didn’t watch it. We had wine, but not water. We talked of punk music, but not war. Of banned books, but not guns. A comment about the unusually warm winter, but no mention of global warming.

I returned home the next morning, restored by fractions and of somewhat sounder body and mind. I threw away the happiness body wash. I deleted Facebook from my phone, deleted task managing apps, deleted emails, deleted unnecessary streams of information from wherever they made contact with me. I made a point to laugh in front of and with my children, and hoped it was not too late to unlearn all that I didn’t need to know.

* * *

This essay first appeared in the “Joy” issue of Creative Nonfiction, the print quarterly founded by nonfiction writer Lee Gutkind in 1993. Our thanks to Angela Palm and the staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

 

Politics as a Defense Against Heartbreak

Illustration by Janna Morton

Minda Honey | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (2,955 words)

One week into the new year, my friends assembled in the cellar lounge of an upscale restaurant to celebrate my 33rd birthday. On that frigid January night, we drank fancy cocktails made with bourbon, made with bitters, made with things that don’t seem like they go together but do. Music meant to be forgotten even as you’re listening to it played in the background beneath our chatter. I leapt from my seat, tugged down my short dress and flung my arms around each friend as they arrived. My friends kept my drinks coming all night and properly admired the way my 33-year-old cleavage still defied gravity in the most spectacular way. The group who turned out that night represented nearly every phase of my life from childhood to high school to college to career to the other cities I’ve lived in, but in that amateur episode of “This is Your Life” the romantic partner I longed for had yet to make an appearance. Many of my friends in the small city I call home paired off years ago. I’m always the one without a date to every party, even my own.

A girl I’ve known since we rode the bus together in elementary school offered to give me a tarot reading. She settled on the couch across from me and I cut and shuffled the deck as instructed. She flipped each card over and carefully placed it down on the small round table between us — 10 in all. First was the Wheel of Fortune, perhaps commentary on the success I’d seen over the past year as a writer, and last was the Queen of Wands, maybe insight into my passion for nurturing community and my ambitions for the upcoming year. But it was the middle card that interested me most. When my friend turned over the sixth card, the card that predicts what lies ahead, it was an older white man with a long white beard seated on a throne, The Emperor. “Oh, interesting,” she said.

She foresaw a man coming into my life. He would not be a young man. He would be a good influence. Maybe business, maybe love. I wondered, would he be the man I’ve been waiting for? Like many women, I’d thought by 30 I’d have found The One. Had there been a candle to blow out, my birthday wish would have been for the perfect man for me: an educated, financially stable, liberal feminist. A man who was a manifestation of my politics, of all the things I believed in.
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The Placeless and the Privileged

I last read about the startup Roam, which caters to affluent digital nomads seeking a ready-made community whether they’re in London, Tokyo, or Miami, in Jessa Crispin’s Outline story from last summer. Based on her experiences in the company’s compound in Bali, she questioned the possibility of an authentic communal experience in a place that depended on the cheap cost of living and stark income gaps between Roam patrons and the local labor force.

In the New York Times Magazine, Kyle Chayka revisits Roam, this time in Miami, where he observes different nuances of satisfaction and alienation — from the real, if temporary connections that people seem to make during their stays, to the growing sense that this was more “immersive group therapy” than a travel experience. Some of the most interesting moments in Chayka’s piece, however, go beyond the (easily parodied) surface of the wealthy-tech-nomad lifestyle. He also examines the deeper forces that have made a concept like Roam not just attractive to a subset of (mostly young) professionals, but almost a logical, necessary outcome of the current economic moment. As Roam founder Bruno Haid tells it, the startup is “a means of letting human capital find the path of least resistance, wherever it may be.”

There is a vicious plausibility to Haid’s vision. The macroeconomic pressures he describes in the urbanized West — a lack of affordable housing and linear careers — are particularly tough on millennials, who are also, incidentally or not, a historically unattached generation, with low rates of marriage, homeownership and childbearing. If the usual trappings of adulthood don’t seem attainable, and a permanent sense of precariousness seems unavoidable, why not embrace impermanence instead? Already there are partial nomads all around you; you just might not think of them that way yet. There’s the writer who spends a few months of every year in Berlin, making up for diminishing freelance wages with cheap Neukölln rent; the curator bouncing between New York and Los Angeles; the artist jumping from Tokyo residency to Istanbul fellowship. In the competitive freelance economy, geographic mobility has become a superficial sign of both success and creative freedom: the ability to do anything, anywhere, at any time.

Those in less artsy careers who chase that same sort of freedom may find it illusory. The new technologies that have liberated us from place have also made employers more comfortable with remote workers, but only because we can be so easily monitored. Combine this interconnectivity with an increasing population of freelancers — over a third of the American work force makes money in the so-called gig economy — and you have the makings of a nomad boom. Haid estimates his target customer base to be around 1.2 million people who make over $80,000 a year and could live anywhere. Pieter Levels, creator of the social network Nomad List, believes there to be a nomad population in the high hundreds of thousands.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by Brenton Geach / Gallo Images / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Mark Arax, David Grann, Stephanie Nolen, Eleanor Cummins, and David Marchese.

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Struggling to Balance Business and Conservation in the Amazon Basin

AP Photo/Andre Penner, File

Many nations have turned their natural resources into riches. Canada and the US liquidated their old-growth forests and plowed their prairies to build themselves into global economic powers. Brazil wants to do the same. Its massive Amazon basin is the world’s last terrestrial frontier. Its tropical rainforests contain 15% of the earth’s species, filter one-fifth of the planet’s rainfall and so much carbon that they play a key role in regulating the earth’s climate. They also offer enormous opportunities for logging, ranching and agricultural development, so how can Brazil serve these contradictory ambitions to develop and protect the Amazon?

For The Globe & Mail, journalist Stephanie Nolen and photographer Aaron Vincent Elkaim drove 1,200 miles on a single road, BR-163, to talk to the people who live in the Amazon, the police who chase its illegal loggers and miners, a politician fined for cattle grazing, and the villagers caught in the crossfire. Deep reporting and crisp photography show what this complicated green land looks like not from above the green forest canopy like so many familiar aerial shots, but on the ground. What Nolen finds is the complicated ways Brazil’s global ecological responsibility falls to not just of politicians and law enforcement, but to the farmers, ranchers, and illegal land speculators who cut the rainforest to capitalize on it. In a very real way, climate change has forced many Brazilians to recognize that they are not only citizens of Brazil, but citizens of the world who can no longer simply act according to their own economic ambitions. So some Brazilian leaders say they want to control illegal deforestation, and they discuss how to incentivize forest conservation while allowing development. As one soy farmer put it: “It’s not just me who needs to breathe fresh air – it’s the whole world. But the world can’t overload us, producers, with this responsibility. We need to share some of this responsibility with society as a whole.” That’s a challenge as big as the Amazon, and not everyone feels hopeful about the prospects. How could you when certain districts have a single agent to patrol 2.5 million acres of forest?

Ms. Ferreira spoke simply and gently as she explained the charges to Mr. Lima, the head of the small group of miners; Mr. de Jesus helped him ink his thumb to sign the charge sheet he couldn’t read.

“Did you know this was Jamanxim Forest and you can’t mine here?” she asked Mr. Lima.

“No,” he replied, “I never heard that.” He was standing with one foot on an old wooden sign that identified the area as protected; he couldn’t read that, either.

“The government speaks pretty words about protecting the forest – but we will lose 50 per cent of our budget next year,” said Mr. Fucks. “We need [more] employees and three times as many vehicles. We only have what we do because foreign governments donate them … We’re losing. But if we had three times as many people, we could win.”

Ms. Ferreira, peeling off her bullet-proof vest at the end of the day, questioned whether beefing up their ranks would really make a difference. The most powerful politicians in Novo Progresso, she pointed out, own the farms inside the forest. “If the punishment was serious – if the law applied here … Even if we had 100 vehicles and all these people, it wouldn’t fix it. Because it’s politics.”

Read the story

The Road

Longreads Pick

Brazil’s massive Amazon rainforest basin is the world’s last terrestrial frontier. Like all frontiers, it’s getting developed for profit and nation-building at the expense of first nations and the native ecosystem. Unlike other frontiers, it’s happening as the world struggles to address climate change. In this epic, in-depth story, Stephanie Nolen travels 1,200 miles on a single road, BR-163, to examine whether Brazil can utilize the Amazon to build itself into a first-world economy while protecting enough forest to honor its global ecological responsibility.

Published: Jan 26, 2018
Length: 41 minutes (10,491 words)

What Happens Between What Seems Like All the Facts: On Interviewing Artists

(Photo courtesy the Auping family)

Jonny Auping| Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,011 words)

Michael Auping recently retired after 25 years as the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His 40-year curatorial career, which focused on the international development of postwar art, has resulted in numerous, critically-acclaimed exhibitions featuring many of the 20th century’s most prominent visual artists.

Before becoming a curator, Auping spent his post-graduate years in mid-70s Southern California trying to figure out how to break into the art world. Around 1975, he came across the book Workingby Studs Terkel, in which the author interviews various working people — from parking valets and cab drivers to gravediggers and pharmacists — about the meaning they find in their jobs. Auping began going to the studios of Los Angeles-based artists like Robert Irwin, Tony Delap, and Craig Kauffman to record conversations about their work, their background, and most importantly, their process.

His new book, Forty Years: Just Talking About Art, is a compilation of interviews ranging from 1977 to 2017 featuring artists such as Frank Stella, Lucian Freud, Susan Rothenberg, Bruce Nauman. Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and many others. Read more…

Vanishing As a Way to Reclaim Your Life

(Sankai / Getty Images)

Laura Smith | The Art of Vanishing | Viking | February 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)

I have long been in the habit of passing by houses and wondering about the people who live inside. I grew up in a residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the kind where the homes are close together and neighbors often wind up knowing more than they might like to. Before dinner, I would escape my house to walk our little white lapdog. The predictability of the ritual — setting the table, filling water glasses, the sight of my parents’ briefcases in the hall — filled me with dread. A day had ended exactly as it had the day before, and it would end the exact same way the next day and possibly forever.

This wasn’t how I wanted my life to be. I imagined that when I grew up, I would live all over the world. I would be an explorer of the wilderness, an observer of animals, a connoisseur of cultures, a collector of the unfamiliar. I envisioned hastily packed suitcases, maps, binoculars, huts in the mountains, spare hotel rooms in dusty cities, Jeeps tearing down muddy roads into the jungle.

As I wandered the streets of my neighborhood, I was shopping for other possibilities, other lives lived in other houses. But those lives appeared to be exactly the same as mine. In well-lit dining rooms and kitchens I saw other families setting the table, calling the children downstairs, washing their dishes in the sinks. Television screens illuminated family rooms where exhausted parents slumped on couches after a long day in the office. Children did their homework by the glow of Pottery Barn desk lamps. I imagined that after their parents went to sleep, when the loneliness of those quiet hours became too much to bear, they whispered to each other beneath their sheets.

During the day they roamed the perimeters of their neighborhoods on bicycles and were driven to soccer and piano practice. They learned about faraway places in textbooks and on the news, but it seemed as if there had never been anything but this, no other place than here. Thirty years on they would come back to houses like these and do the same things all over again.

I wasn’t sure what my mother did for a living, though I had memorized her job title because it sounded important and I was proud that it might be. “She’s a health policy analyst,” I told a friend. “What does that mean?” the friend asked. “It means she saves lives,” I said, feeling fairly confident that this wasn’t true, except perhaps in an abstract sense. But I wanted it to be true. I wanted the stakes of daily life to be more exciting than desks, screens, and fluorescent lights.

I passed by house after house, each one a nighttime domestic diorama: Homo sapiens suburbae. These people had nothing to do with the world of mystery, dark deeds, and wilderness that I was sure was out there somewhere. My house — if I had a house — would be different. It would be in the mountains, or the jungle, or maybe in the middle of a city. My children and I would eat ice cream before dinner and play freeze tag at night by the light of fireflies. We would have a menagerie of animals. If you stood outside our house at night, you would hear peals of laughter. You would see tickle wars and pillow fights in warm, glowing rooms. But then another thought struck me: what if the reason all these people lived the same lives was that this was the only way?

As I grew older, the fantasy began to erode. Where would the money come from? Would I have a partner, someone to help me? Where would the Jeep in the jungle take me and for what purpose? Where would my children go to school? Would I even have children?

When I was in my mid-20s, I heard a story about a young woman who had also dreamed of leading a life of adventure, and I could not get it out of my head. Her name was Barbara Newhall Follett. She was a child prodigy and had published an acclaimed novel at the age of 12. People called her a genius. A photograph was taken as she corrected her proofs with a quill, smiling proudly at someone to the left of the photographer. When she was 13, she left her parents and traveled the high seas with a hardened crew. Later that year she published a memoir about the experience. She was deeply knowledgeable about botany, butterflies, and much of the natural world. She was an accomplished violinist and a talented poet, but above all she was a writer. She had been writing short stories since the age of five.

“She’s your kind of person,” my friend Robert said when he pointed me to an article about her. I had led an ordinary childhood and no one has ever accused me of being a genius, but Barbara and I shared a love of literature and the outdoors. There was something else too: a certain temperamental similarity — a restlessness. Later I began to wonder about Robert’s true motivation for telling me about her. When she was almost exactly my age, she vanished without a trace. He knew I would want to find her.

***

It happened on December 7, 1939. The residents of Brookline, Massachusetts, were busily preparing for Christmas. Miss Ayers’s shop on Beacon Street was selling Christmas wrapping paper, ribbons, and stationery. Hendries’s offered ice cream sculpted in the shape of Santa Claus. The Village Flower Shop was stocked full of poinsettias, and all around town people were placing orders for turkeys at 19 cents a pound. As night set in, the temperature hovered around freezing and the gas lamps flickered in the darkness. Families prepared for dinner in their clapboard houses on Walnut Street and their Victorian houses with trellised porches on Cyprus Street.

For some, the looming holidays brought a twinge of pain, their sadness cast in sharp relief against the holiday cheer. A 15-year-old boy ran away from school that day. A middle-aged woman didn’t come home that night. Four people reported their dogs missing, and a 22-year-old girl slit her wrists and then disappeared.

On Kent Street, Barbara’s marriage was coming to an end. The young couple’s apartment was comfortable but modest, with a fireplace and a rounded row of windows overlooking the quiet street below. She was 25, fine-featured, and tomboyish, with a long auburn bob. She hadn’t planned on this kind of life. She hadn’t planned on bickering about who would hang the curtains or what music to play at a dinner party. She had never intended to sit in an office all day, a large round clock ticking the minutes away. She hadn’t  planned on having a husband or a house.

The Boston and Albany Railroad had a depot around the corner and Black Falcon station, with its enormous ships fastened in the harbors, was just five miles away. There were ways to escape from Brookline, to get out of a marriage, to alter the patterns of a life. Barbara gathered her notebook and $30. She walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night. She was never seen or heard from again.

***

The apartment was exactly as I had envisioned it: in a low-rise building with rounded turrets and a plain façade in a quiet neighborhood of small apartments and clapboard houses, with a few shops and restaurants. A few houses down, an old man in a neatly pressed button-down shirt was mowing his lawn. Brookline is a town that seems to belong to another time, giving it a Halloween feel regardless of the season. There was a whiff of mystery, a sense that something more was going on behind those well-kempt exteriors. Or maybe I was reading into it because I knew something had happened in that building 75 years before.

I was lurking in front of Barbara’s building when a middle-aged Australian woman came out to put her trash in the dumpster. We started talking. I explained that this was the last place Barbara had been seen. “Would you like to come inside?” she asked.

Barbara walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night.

A few moments later, I stood in front of the large, curved living-room windows, wondering if this very apartment had been Barbara’s. Below the window, I could hear the man mowing his lawn. I wondered how many Saturdays, for how many years, he had done exactly that. The mechanical hum of the mower was oddly comforting. The woman’s boxer, Harry, butted his snout against my legs while I answered her questions. I was looking for Barbara, I said. I doubted I would find her, but I hoped to gather clues and learn more. I had reason to believe that she was the vanishing type, capable of erasing one life and creating another. But there were other, more sinister possibilities to consider as well. I was just a year older than Barbara when she vanished, and this fact seemed significant to me. I had a sense that the decisions I was making then would determine the rest of my life. Like with a rocket ship, the trajectory set on the ground was critical; a fraction of a degree in the wrong direction could send me to a wildly different place.

Somewhere along the line, in ways barely perceptible at first, things went wrong for Barbara. From my vantage point, her life was both an inspiration and a warning. But I couldn’t think of how to explain this to the Australian woman, so I thanked her and left.

***

Life with P.J. was easy. We usually wanted to do the same things, which came as a huge relief. My previous relationship had been a constant battle over how to spend our time. My ex-boyfriend had mostly wanted to listen to lethargic jam bands stoned out of his mind. I wanted to hike, read, write, or go out with friends. A simple trip to the grocery store could cause an epic fight because we couldn’t agree on how we would get there, when we would go, or even what we would buy. But moving through the day with P.J. was effortless.

Four years later, on the roof of our apartment in Washington, D.C., P.J. asked me to marry him. He was nervous and had turned around to face me too suddenly, which startled me. Yes, I said. Obviously yes.

It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery. I told myself I would never do that. But when people asked me why I had chosen to get married, I had no answer. I don’t know, I said. Because sometimes people fall in love and want to announce to themselves and the world that they plan to stay together forever. Love was the factor I hadn’t considered.

I didn’t do a cost and benefit analysis. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about marriage at all because marrying P.J. hadn’t felt like a choice. He was a fact of life now. Questioning his place in it seemed as worthwhile as pondering whether I should keep my arms and legs. But I was squeamish about the wedding and skeptical of its meticulous choreography.

In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, there is a section on “bad faith” — behaving without sincerity, lying to oneself. Sartre describes a café scene in which a waiter is serving his customers: “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly…he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” The waiter, as Sartre describes him, is imprisoned in his performance, relegating himself to the singular role that society allows him, rather than allowing himself the freedom of a more honest manner of being. What troubled me most about the concept of bad faith was not that we might lie to others, but that we might lie to ourselves. Self-deception is degrading. You wish you could have just a smidge more integrity. Your falseness lingers in the air and follows you through the day.

It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery.

In the carefully scripted wedding rituals, I detected bad faith. I felt less like a bride and more like a person pretending to be a bride, the way a little girl might process through her living room with a pillowcase draped over her head toward some imaginary groom. I refused to take engagement photos because who would ever believe that we were spontaneously bounding through a field at sunset holding hands? Or making out in front of a brick wall? Who was this photo for? It couldn’t be for us because anytime we looked at it we would know all the work that went into it: a long afternoon spent smiling to the point of jaw exhaustion.

I sidestepped this icky feeling by outsourcing the wedding planning to my mother. I announced to everyone that I could not be bothered to care about napkin colors or floral arrangements. The only things P.J. and I would deign to opine on were the things that truly mattered: the beer selection, the music, and the wedding cake, which would not be wedding cake because wedding cake tastes bad. We would eat pie. We also cared about the wedding ceremony, which we designed ourselves. These things — the food, the drinks, the music, the ceremony — turned out to be most of the details of the wedding.

The problem was that I both wanted to avoid dealing with the particulars of the wedding and that I came to see each choice as symbolic of the kind of life we would live together. As my mother went about happily making her plans, if they veered toward the traditional or the frilly I would swiftly intervene, outraged.

One night, P.J. and I went to my parents’ house for dinner. We arrived with a pizza box in hand. I had decided that I wanted the wedding to be a pizza party (never mind that my father is gluten intolerant) held at the neighborhood bar, which was also a Ping-Pong hall. P.J. and my father sat silently at their ends of the table, looking wan, while my mother and I shouted viciously at each other. It was the kind of shouting that makes the neighbors wonder if they should call to see if everything is all right. My mother informed me in no uncertain terms that the family from Arkansas would not be coming all the way to D.C. for a pizza party at a Ping-Pong bar. She would have been more likely to agree to a wedding conducted on the moon in the nude. I informed her that, in that case, the family in Arkansas could attend a wedding at which the bride would not be present.

A few weeks later, my sister, my mother, P.J.’s mother, sister, and sister-in-law, and three of my friends gathered in a boutique for what was to be a long day of wedding dress shopping. The attention made me uncomfortable. I worried that they didn’t really want to be there. Why would anyone want to follow someone around all day while they shopped for a dress? I tried on the first dress and announced, “This is it. I want to buy this one.”

“What?” said the confused saleswoman. My friends and family (three of whom had traveled more than a hundred miles to be there) gaped. It would be the quickest wedding dress purchase in the history of wedding dresses, a staggering 15 seconds.

“Maybe you should try on another one, just to be sure,” my mom suggested.

“No,” I said. “I want this one.” I thought it was reasonably priced and didn’t want to drag the process out.

My mother suggested we move on to the bridesmaid dresses, but this too was contentious because I wanted the bridesmaids to wear whatever they wanted.

“Why must everyone match?” I asked.

“Why are you such a pain in the ass?” my sister shot back. “No, really, tell me why.” What she meant was, Why must everything be a statement?

But to me, the statement was the whole point. My wedding was becoming a demonstration of all the things P.J. and I were not. The dresses, the napkins, the seating charts seemed an initiation into a domestic life that frightened me, one I had observed as a child and had sworn never to take part in. The wedding was an opportunity to declare, most of all to myself, that I could live according to whatever rules I wanted.

So when a Cuisinart was delivered to our apartment, my stomach dropped. It wasn’t going to be that kind of marriage. My uncle had given us matching camping backpacks, and I had found that gift extremely gratifying. It aligned with the person I wanted to be: someone on the move, ready to jet off to some exciting adventure at barely a moment’s notice, someone unencumbered.

Yet if I truly hadn’t wanted the Cuisinart, I would have given it away. Instead, I left it in its box above the kitchen cabinets, where I eyed it with suspicion and, occasionally, longing. Domestic objects had a mysterious power over me. I was both attracted to them and repulsed by them. The Cuisinart was sort of beautiful, with its sleek metal base. It promised homemade salsas and soft serve made of bananas and Nutella. How bad can life be when you are making your own soft serve?

I purged my life of household items with fervor. In limiting my exposure to them, I was hoping to cauterize the desire at its source. The longing for a beautiful teacup would never be satisfied by buying just one teacup. Once I had it, I would want some other beautiful thing, setting off a chain of longing and acquisition that would drag down my whole life. Even a single day spent around the house made me nearly frantic. I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all. No beautiful teacups ever.

Other kinds of household items — the ones you need in order to live — filled me with joy. I enjoyed seeing my toothbrush beside P.J.’s, his shoes mixed in with mine. I enjoyed grocery shopping with him, knowing that he liked the grainy mustard more than the smooth kind, the hard cheeses more than Brie. I felt the seductive appeal of controlling my surroundings, of nesting among picturesque things.

I told myself that it didn’t matter if I was ambivalent about the wedding because I wasn’t ambivalent about P.J. And though I didn’t want to admit it, I craved the security of marriage. A handsome, kind man had agreed to tie his life to mine, to mix his shoes in with mine, to grocery shop with me, to list my name on his emergency contact forms forever. It was a vote of confidence in me and in my vision of how to live. The comfort that this knowledge provided released me from the pressure to find other forms of stability. I started taking on more ambitious writing projects because if they didn’t work out I would still have P.J. I could live anywhere in the world because P.J. would be there. We had very little money, but being broke with someone else is far preferable to being broke alone. Surely between the two of us we would figure out how to make enough money to scrape by. I did not view my impending marriage as a constraint. I told myself that it was a means of escape from the constraints of the rest of the world.

***

A year before our wedding, P.J. and I decided we needed to get out of D.C. Leaving would mean saying goodbye to nearly everyone we knew, which was, at least to me, exactly the point. Wanting to flee, if only for a time, is a fairly common fantasy. Anyone who has felt it will recognize that this feeling manages to coexist with the fact that you may love your friends and family very much. I love you. Please go away.

Many of our friends from our respective high schools, our college friends, our parents, and P.J.’s siblings and their combined five children lived within a five-mile radius of our home. There was an endless string of birthdays, happy hours, going-away or coming-home parties, soccer games, holiday and engagement parties. I often felt that rather than trying to actually spend time together in a meaningful way, we were crossing things — or people — off our to-do lists.

The total lack of spontaneity was making me fidgety. In college, I hadn’t done extracurricular activities, even ones I would have enjoyed, because I didn’t like the idea that I would have to agree to weekly meetings. As a result, I spent a lot of nights doing nothing when I could have been doing something constructive; but knowing I was free to do as I pleased was what I cared about most. Now I knew ahead of time what I would be doing every weekend for the next five months. I dreamed of saying to family and friends, “I don’t want to see you today because I need to be alone, or I need to write, or wander around without a plan, and that’s not a reflection of how I feel about you.”

I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all.

I might have enjoyed the merry-go-round of social events more had I not been working so much. I was running my family’s coffee shop, waking up at five in the morning to open the store in the dark, do inventory, organize and restock the line, brew coffee, order more, create the next week’s schedule, and serve food and drinks all day. Often I had to cover shifts for employees who had overslept or were sick. On the rare occasion when I wasn’t in the shop, my cell phone would ring incessantly with questions from the staff. “The sink is clogged and overflowing.” “There’s a crazy man shouting at himself in the bathroom.” “We’re out of peanut butter.” “There’s a weird smell coming from the basement.” Each time my phone rang, it reminded me that  I wasn’t a good manager. I had created an environment where people were helpless in my absence.

At night I came home with my jeans stained with coffee grounds, worrying about two employees who were fighting or a tense interaction with a customer. I was physically exhausted, but when I got in bed, instead of going to sleep, I cycled through the next day’s to-do list. We’re out of whole milk, I reminded myself. And don’t forget to order more bowls for the catering job next week. The new employee is coming in at 11; print her paperwork first thing.

I was beginning to see that when your days are all the same, your weeks, months, and years blend together. The alumni association of my high school asked for an update for the school magazine and I didn’t have one. “Nothing has changed,” I imagined writing. “Laura Smith, Class of 2004, is exactly the same.” I imagined that my classmates were climbing the Annapurna circuit, kayaking the length of the Nile, and rescuing earthquake victims in China. I longed to see other places. Even looking at a map was painful because it reminded me of how mired I was in my life. A National Geographic special about the pyramids came on, and I thought, I really might never get to Egypt. My world was small.

“When are you coming over?” my mother and P.J.’s would ask in rapid succession. “Let’s get a date on the calendar for something this week.”

“You’re smothering me,” I said to my mother. “That sounds nice,” I said to P.J.’s mother.

One night I looked into the bathroom mirror, feeling suddenly daunted by the task of flossing my teeth. How could I possibly bring myself to do one more thing I didn’t want to do? I slept fitfully that night and had a dream that I had fallen asleep at a dinner party and was surrounded by an endless cacophony of cocktail chatter and clinking glasses. I had never spent less time reading or writing in my life, probably since I had learned to read and write, and the lack of it made my life feel lusterless. “My brain is dying,” I told P.J. I was an automaton outputting work and taking in food and drink.

P.J. sometimes came in to help on the weekends, working behind the counter so I wouldn’t have to. He was teaching at a nearby high school and was often up grading papers until the early hours of the morning, but he never complained about the extra work. He memorized the smoothie recipes and sometimes made them wrong. I didn’t care because I was so grateful not to be the one making them.

His desire to please others was great when it worked in my favor. But when he wanted to please others at my expense I would grow irritated. “Of course we’ll be there!” I heard him say into the phone. I shot him a death stare, signaling that I was going to strangle him. He shrugged helplessly, whispering, “If we leave the dinner at nine we can be at the birthday party just half an hour after it starts.”

“Do you actually want to go?” I would ask him. Sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes it was no. When he would commit to things I didn’t want to do, I wouldn’t allow myself to blame him. It was the other person’s fault. I didn’t want to think about the fact that sometimes I felt trapped by him.

I wrote during any free moment I could get. After work, late at night, I would write in the darkness of our studio apartment while P.J. slept in the bed nearby. In between placing orders, I wrote in the coffee shop’s cavernous unfinished basement, which smelled like damp concrete. Sometimes I typed notes on my cell phone between shifts. But the moments snatched here and there were never enough. I could never really gather the intense concentration needed because I was constantly interrupted.

“I can’t live without writing,” a journalist friend told me. I rolled my eyes because the truth is that you can live without writing. In fact, often we must live without it.

If I wasn’t writing, I was simmering with frustration about how I should be. At a bar with friends, even if I was having a good time, I would silently berate myself for again being lured away from my work. I wanted to write more than I wanted to be near the people I loved. Sometimes I worried that this made me small-hearted or selfish, but it seemed constitutional and therefore unlikely to change.

I began writing about a woman who disappears. Not Barbara, but a fictional woman. She was a botanist who had vanished, perhaps deliberately, in the Burmese jungle in search of a rare, psychedelic mushroom. I wrote about her because, of course, I wanted to disappear. Often those who write about women who have vanished are men with an impulse to eviscerate women, or women with an impulse to eviscerate themselves. I was interested in a different kind of vanishing: the kind where you disentangle yourself from your life and start fresh. People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life. You hadn’t abandoned them. You were just gone. Mysterious rather than rejecting. Vanishing was a way to reclaim your life.

“Let’s leave the country,” P.J. said one night after work over burritos at a Mexican chain restaurant. We had been talking casually about moving abroad for a while, but the idea was tantalizing and somehow more urgent now that we were deep in the weeds of wedding planning. Moving away was another way to say no without having to say it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I imagined myself saying. “We can’t go to dinner because we’ll be in Asia.” We had talked about traveling, but never in a way that felt like more than daydreaming. But a few months earlier a local restaurant owner had offered to buy our coffee shop, at a loss of course, and my dad and I jumped at the opportunity to be rid of what had once been a dream. Without the coffee shop, P.J. and I could shed everything that had burdened us in D.C.

“Can we please?” I said.

“We can do whatever we want,” P.J. said.

* * *

Two days after the wedding, P.J. and I were in his sister’s basement frantically packing. A book I wanted was nowhere to be found, a friend was dropping by with a last-minute wedding present, and we were trying to figure out what to do with $130 in coins another friend had given us as a generous gag gift. We had a plane to catch, I had a stress rash on my face, and somehow in the post-wedding rush I had strained my neck, making it painful to turn my head to the right. We were moving to Southeast Asia for a year, mostly because it was the farthest away we could get on the planet before coming back around again. The weather, the people, the sounds and smells would all be new to us. Days would be remarkable again.

We had saved some money and had a few freelance writing and research contracts that could be done remotely. That money would cover our expenses, which would be minimal: we had picked Southeast Asia because it was cheap.

People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life.

I ran upstairs, tore the cushions off the couch, didn’t find the book, then ran downstairs to my backpack and started ripping out the clothing I had neatly rolled inside. Our backpacks contained everything we would need for the next year, which it turned out wasn’t much. We’d each packed five shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of pants, and a couple of pairs of shoes. There were also our computers, books, and two notebooks. Other than knowing what I would wear for the next year, I had no real plan. Suddenly, I didn’t care about the book. We were leaving, and how little our old lives would overlap with our new one was thrilling.

We drove to Dulles International Airport with our respective parents because both sets wanted to take us. P.J.’s sister and her children followed behind in their minivan. This vast crowd stood in a knot at the international departures area to watch us check in. At the check-in counter, something appeared to be wrong.

“You don’t have return tickets?” the ticket taker asked.

“That’s correct,” P.J. said.

“What is your plan for exiting Thailand?”

“We’ll be leaving by bus.”

I turned around and looked at our families standing behind us. Their faces were hopeful. Had we botched the trip? Would we have to stay home forever?

A few months earlier, my mother-in-law had sat us down on her porch and said, “Maybe you should consider going away for a few months instead of a year.” I felt something constrict in my chest. She seemed to be asking us not to change, or to get onto some kind of track. To her, this was a trip. We would come back to our apartment in D.C., back to her house for dinner on Sundays, to “regular” (i.e., office) jobs and daily routines. The coffee shop had been a nice little digression, but that hadn’t turned out so well. Teaching — that was fine in your 20s, as long as it was a stepping-stone to something more prestigious. And now this “trip.” It was time to grow up and get serious. This line of thinking made me want to run screaming in the opposite direction. I couldn’t describe the life I wanted, but this was not it.

It was around this time that I read a passage in a novel about two old ladies, a mother and a daughter who lived alone together in some isolated place eating only potatoes. When a stranger came across them, he was struck by how the pair seemed to have withered mentally without outside stimulus. Having only each other to talk to, they were nearly mute. Without other minds, other sights, other experiences, they had grown dull. The passage had sent a jolt of fear through me. I was surrounded by people who loved me, people whom I loved, and yet I was wilting. I thought about Wilson Follett and the urgency he felt to end his “poisonous” marriage. Maybe Helen wasn’t poisonous, but something about family life was. I didn’t like the idea that I might be anything like Wilson, who was, in many ways, the villain of Barbara’s story.

You must be vigilant, Wilson argued, because even the best-intentioned love can strangle. You cannot protect the things you love by sealing them in airtight containers. When you pin a butterfly and put it behind glass, you kill it. Barbara put her butterflies in a sieve, studied them, and then released them back into the wild. Go outside, she seemed to be saying. Be fearless, life will be over soon.

Barbara once signed a letter to her father, “With love and love and love and love and LOVE and LOVE,” each inky love becoming larger and larger. When her father wasn’t there, she wrote, “I am longing to see you” and “I miss you terribly.” Where is the dividing line in a love like this? At some point, love crosses over from being the buoy that lifts you up to the tide that drags you under. My chest was pounding as I sat on the porch and P.J.’s mother asked us to stay, and it was pounding just as loudly in the airport as we tried to leave. Perhaps Wilson was just being who he was when he left his family. Maybe I was too. It wasn’t a question of wrong or right or ingratitude. It was a compulsion.

Standing at the check-in counter, I imagined failing to get our boarding passes and piling back into the family cars. I could picture our mothers’ looks of contented relief as we all drove home together. Put us on that fucking airplane, I thought.

“Listen,” P.J. said to the agent, “if when we land in Thailand they want us to turn back around, we’ll do that.”

The woman shrugged and processed our tickets.

We were running away not just from home but from a certain idea of what married life should be. Marriage is in many ways freedom’s opposite, the binding of one life to another—in theory at least—forever. So as I tied myself to P.J. with one hand, I untethered myself from the rest of my life—family, friends, my job, my apartment—with the other.

As the plane lifted off the tarmac, I felt I had escaped. But leaving the country for a year isn’t that unusual. People quit their jobs and move all the time. They travel. It’s an indulgence, but nothing truly revolutionary. Yet suspended in the night sky, surrounded by strangers reading, talking, and sleeping, I knew leaving meant much more than that. If you had asked me then what I would have been willing to risk to find freedom, I would have said everything — except P.J.

* * *

From The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust by Laura Smith. Published by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Laura Smith.