What Killed My Sister?
The answer—schizophrenia—only leads to more perplexing questions:
Susanne Long was my sister, three years younger. She was funny and savvy. She was creative and kind and curious. She had a master’s degree, and she taught English as a second language in Washington, D.C., and later in Seattle. She spent two tours of duty in the Peace Corps, one in Liberia, the other in Morocco. She baked, cooked, knitted, quilted, played recorder. She took photographs. She loved to learn languages, and she loved to garden. She trained as a marathon runner. She was happily married, then unhappily married, then divorced. She was a great beauty, with high cheekbones and a Queen Nefertiti nose. She loved to hang out with her friends.
At the age of 32, never before, schizophrenia came to call. She began to hear nasty phrases hissed at her: We’re going to get you, etc. We may call them voices, but to her they were sentences spoken from the mouths of colleagues and passersby.
Longreads Member Exclusive: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis
This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains.
Unauthorized, but Not Untrue
The real story of a biographer in a celebrity culture of public denials, media timidity, and legal threats. “Even after all these years I’m still not comfortable with the term unauthorized, because it sounds so nefarious, almost as if it involves breaking and entering. Admittedly, biography by its very nature is an invasion of a life—an intimate examination by the biographer, who burrows deeper and deeper to probe the unknown, reveal the unseen, illuminate the unexpected. Despite my discomfort with the word, I firmly believe that unauthorized biography can be a public service and a boon to history.”
We’ll Always Have McSorley’s
I discovered the following lines from an e. e. cummings poem that the editor of the anthology had titled “Snug and Warm Inside McSorley’s”: I was sitting in mcsorley’s. outside it was new york and beautifully snowing. “It’s a bar,” said Lola, my girlfriend in those days. “In New York City.”
Living on $500,000 a Year
What F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns reveal about his life and times
Enough Already
What I’d really like to tell the bores in my life
Solitude and Leadership: On Learning to Be Alone With Your Thoughts
You will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason. As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution.