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The Fugitive and the Chameleon

Longreads Pick

“Mario’s father had gone by many names. Luis Archuleta. Lawrence Pusateri. The man the son knew as Ramon was just a fraction of his way into what may be one of the longest fugitive runs in U.S. history — a 50-year game of cat-and-mouse that played out across the West, from the streets of Colorado to the shores of California and many dusty, sun-bleached points in between.”

Source: Deseret News
Published: Aug 2, 2021
Length: 24 minutes (6,154 words)

Judge a Book Not By its Gender

Illustration by Carolyn Wells

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | May, 2021 | 29 minutes (7,916 words)

I blame Drew Barrymore for two things: the amount of money I have spent on celebrity memoirs and an unfortunate attempt to dye my hair platinum blonde in 1993, inspired by Drew’s locks in a Seventeen magazine Guess Jeans ad.

Little Girl Lost, Barrymore’s 1990 account of growing up as a child star in Hollywood, was my first celebrity autobiography. It ignited my love of celebrity memoirs, especially those by women. My dog-eared copy has survived numerous book purges and cross-country moves. I am not alone in my appreciation for it. The coming-of-age tale was a New York Times bestseller and although the book is now out of print, it has achieved cult-like status. It was even the subject of a 2018 New York Times Magazine Letter of Recommendation.

Barrymore was just 11 months old when she got her start in a television commercial for Puppy Chow. At 7 she starred as Gertie in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1982 film E.T. and that same year became the youngest person ever to host Saturday Night Live. Barrymore’s drug and alcohol use began shortly after E.T. phoned home. The first time she got drunk she was 9. Barrymore started smoking weed at 10 and by 12 had moved on to cocaine. The actress entered rehab at 13; during her second stint in rehab she completed Little Girl Lost, which was published when she was just 16.

Barrymore’s drug and alcohol use began shortly after E.T. phoned home.

Gossip and juicy stories about nightclubbing with Jack Nicholson definitely make for a good read, but what initially drew me to the book was that Barrymore wrote it to counter stories about herself in the National Enquirer. “[I]magining the godawful headlines — ‘Drew Barrymore Cocaine Addict at Twelve Years Old’ or ‘Barrymore Burns Out in Teens’ — and the impression people would get of me was all my worst possible fears come true. I would’ve been the last person on Earth to deny my problems, but I wanted to have the option of confessing them,” Barrymore writes in Little Girl Lost. She wanted to come clean on her own terms. Barrymore’s desire to control her own life story compelled me to read the book and has made me return to it over the years.

Barrymore wanted to redirect her life’s narrative and that’s a popular reason why celebrities embrace the genre, but it is not the only reason. Some stars write their book to revive a stalled career and return to the limelight. For others, memoirs extend their 15 minutes of fame. This is a popular motivation for reality show stars. (Will you accept this rose and this six-figure book deal?) Memoirs also settle old scores. In André Leon Talley’s The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir, the fashion journalist and former Vogue creative director works through his issues with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Memoirs can also promote the brand a star has built around their celebrity. Reese Witherspoon’s Whiskey in a Teacup, which markets the star’s Southern Lifestyle to y’all, or any book from one of Queer Eye’s Fab Five are great examples.

For readers, celebrity memoir appeal lies in the juicy gossip and name dropping, and the chance to peek inside and live, if only for 500 pages, the glamorous lifestyles of the rich and famous. Social media, reality television, celebrity gossip blogs, and the popularity of TMZ-style tabloid journalism have created an insatiable desire to know more about our favorite celebrities. Celebrity memoirs help fulfill this desire. Sometimes, unfortunately, we learn a little too much about our favorite stars. After reading Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist, her third memoir, I am unable to watch Star Wars without thinking about all the coke Fisher said was consumed on set. I imagine the film’s stars hollowing out lightsabers to use like giant straws to blow rails with. (That’s not how the force works!)

While it’s easy to dismiss celebrity memoirs as guilty pleasure reads or unworthy of serious literary consideration, you cannot deny the genre’s popularity. One of the bestselling celebrity memoirs of all time, former first lady Michelle Obama’s 2018 release, Becoming, is still on the The New York Times bestsellers list and has sold more than 10 million copies. Recent months have seen new books from everyone from singer Mariah Carey to actor Matthew McConaughey to soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Celebrity memoirs are big business and we have Rolling Stones co-founder and guitarist Keith Richards to thank for that. His bestselling memoir Life was published in October 2010 and more celebrity autobiographies were published in the four years that followed than had been in the previous 15.

Life, for which Richards received a $7 million dollar advance, sold over one million copies in its first year. Following the success of Life, memoirs by male musicians from Duff McKagan to Steven Tyler were all bestsellers and it is not just men penning the hits. Remember when we all got together and decided women were funny after Bossypants came out? Tina Fey’s 2011 bestselling memoir preceded an onslaught of popular memoirs by funny ladies, including Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) and Amy Poehler’s Yes Please.

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Since first reading Little Girl Lost at 20, I have devoured memoirs by female celebrities from punk singer Alice Bag’s Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story to Jersey Shore star Snooki’s Confessions of a Guidette. I’m interested in how women write their stories, what they leave out, what they focus on, and how much of what they reveal is a reaction to the image of them we have from watching their movies or listening to their music or seeing them stumbling out of nightclubs in Us Weekly.

“How do we edit our life into a decent story? That’s the rub with an autobiography or memoir. What to reveal, what to keep hidden, what to embellish, what to downplay, and what to ignore? How much of the inner and how much of the outer?” says punk icon and Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry in her 2019 memoir, Face It, of a process that is scrutinized and critiqued much more if, like Harry, you’re a woman.

I’m interested in how women write their stories, what they leave out, what they focus on, and how much of what they reveal is a reaction to the image of them we have from watching their movies or listening to their music or seeing them stumbling out of nightclubs in “Us Weekly.”

And while there is no shortage of male celebrities spilling their guts all over my poorly constructed Ikea bookshelf, the fact that they share shelf space with celebrity memoirs written by women is about all they have in common. When it comes to celebrity memoirs there’s a distinct gender bias in everything from how the books are marketed to the type of topics female celebrities are expected to write about and the amount of themselves they are expected to expose to sell books.

The gender divide bias becomes even more problematic, and downright depressing, when you read the reviews and see how critics and the press receive female celebrity memoirs. Rather than celebrate women and their amazing stories, reviewers revert to stereotypes and tired clichés and, in the process, miss the actual story. Women can spend chapters talking about their accomplishments, their awards, and their accolades and reviewers will still only focus on the sex, the scandal, and the bombshell reveals that are expected from female-penned celebrity memoirs if they want to actually sell books. From memoir titles to book blurbs, when it comes to celebrity memoirs by women, sadly, we haven’t come a long way baby.

 

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Debbie Harry’s Face It was one of the most anticipated celebrity memoirs of the recent past. In the book, Harry chronicles everything from her adoption at only 3 months old, to her days in the hippie band Wind in the Willows and all-girl group the Stillettos, to forming both Blondie the band and Blondie the persona. For Harry, Blondie was very much a character she played, one inspired by the “Hey, Blondie!” catcalls she received from construction workers after bleaching her hair, as well as the 1930s Blondie comic strip character who was a “dumb blonde who turns out to be smarter than the rest of them.” Marilyn Monroe was also an inspiration; Harry describes Monroe as “the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body,” who despite her appearance has “a lot of smarts behind the act.”

Face It also covers Harry’s acting in films like Videodrome and Hairspray, her time training as a professional wrestler for a role in the Broadway play Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap, as well as her activism and philanthropy work. (Fun fact: She was almost Pris in Blade Runner, but her record company made her turn it down.) There is certainly no shortage of great material for reviewers to discuss. Unfortunately, they responded with the same tired sexist tropes that greet memoirs written by women.

“In her memoir, Debbie Harry proves she’s more than just a pretty blonde in tight pants,” read the headline on The Washington Post’s review of Face It. The headline was later changed to, “In her memoir, Debbie Harry gives an unvarnished look at her life in the punk scene” after social media responded less than kindly to the sexist headline choice. The Washington Post admitted they botched the headline and appreciated the feedback, but the headline was not the review’s only problem.

The review opens with: “Even if Debbie Harry, of the band Blondie, isn’t to your taste—her voice too smooth, her sexiness too blatant, her music too smooth—you can’t dismiss certain truths about her.” While this sentence is a great example of disdain, it is not a great review opening. I read Bruce Springsteen’s 2016 memoir Born to Run at the same time as Harry’s and tried to imagine the Post opening a review of Springsteen’s book in the same way. To be fair I do find his sexiness far, far too blatant.

So how does the Post open Springsteen’s memoir review? “Why, one might ask, would Bruce Springsteen need to write an autobiography? Haven’t we been listening to it for the past half century? Hasn’t he been telling us his story all along?” says Joe Heim in the review’s first paragraph. Springsteen, a talented songwriter, has already shared so much through his music, what more could he be required to give us? It is okay if you want to sit this one out Bruce, I have heard Atlantic City, and do not require any further emoting from you at this time.

The Post’s review of Face It just goes from bad to worse, with criticism that Harry “sometimes comes across as self-interested” to a focus on the more sensationalist aspects of her story like sex and drugs. (This is an autobiography, right? I didn’t see them complaining about the 79 chapters in Springsteen’s book.) “She had a hookup with an Andy Warhol protégé in a phone booth in Max’s Kansas City and began what she blithely calls ‘chipping and dipping’ in heroin,” reads the review. The Post points out that “Harry is quite explicit in her descriptions of her drug use and sex life,” which they seem to interpret as permission to exploit the more sensationalistic aspects of her life and use them as a focal point in their review.

The review also offers a great example of how media likes to promote and celebrate the idea of women as trailblazers, praising Harry for being candid about the realities of being a female musician (an “unvarnished look”), while also painfully reinforcing the realities of being a female musician by using a sexist, stereotypical headline that focuses only on Harry’s appearance and sex appeal.

Control is a central theme of Harry’s book, whether it be of her image, her band, or her art. Early in the book Harry recounts a record company promoting Blondie’s first album using posters with an image of her in a see-through blouse, despite early reassurances that the posters would only feature headshots and would include all band members. She was not happy with the marketing decision, saying, “Sex sells, that’s what they say, and I’m not stupid, I know that. But on my terms, not some executive’s.” And while doing things on her own terms is a source of pride for Harry, reviewers have a serious problem with it.

For Harry control empowers, for memoir reviewers it threatens. “You can’t control other people’s fantasies or the illusion they’re buying or selling,” says Harry early in Face It when talking about people having posters of her on their bedroom walls. While Harry resigns herself to her lack of control, reviews of her work never want to relinquish theirs. Harry’s insistence on doing things on her own terms is panned by reviewers who call her guarded and closed off.

Reviewers want to read a book by a female celebrity and have her completely figured out by the last page. “[W]hat’s a memoir for, if not to pull back the curtain and check out the lady who is pushing the buttons?” asks Harry in Face It. But when the curtain doesn’t pull back as much as reviewers want, they become resentful, sullen, and offended, reacting with “how dare you?” to any resistance on the part of the woman to give them everything they want, every piece of her. The Atlantic’s review reads almost like it’s giving Harry permission to tell her story on her own terms, saying “holding back is an understandable maneuver for someone who’s been stared at so much.”

One way or another, the reviewers keep the sexist treatment coming when discussing Face It. The Guardian was also annoyed that Harry did not give enough of herself in the book. “It’s a shame that Harry passes up the chance to dig deeper into her experiences of objectification and the nature of fame, but more disappointing is that we learn so little about her interior life, and how she really thinks and feels.” I guess talking about being raped at knifepoint by a stranger is not enough for the reviewer. What’s with the heart of glass Debbie? Give us more of your pain! And on page five, not 105!

I guess talking about being raped at knifepoint by a stranger is not enough for the reviewer. What’s with the heart of glass Debbie? Give us more of your pain! And on page five, not 105!

The headline of Rolling Stone’s piece on Face It highlights how Harry’s book “looks back on what she learned from Andy Warhol and David Bowie.” The media loves to position women in relation to the men in their lives as if the only way we can understand work by women is in the context of the men who orbit them. Despite writing 368 pages about herself, according to Rolling Stone, the only interesting thing about Harry is the famous male company she kept.

The New York Times continues the tired pop culture gender bias with a review that manages to make it all the way to the fourth paragraph before it mentions her age. It also talks about the number of memoirs by female rockers being released at the same time as Harry’s book. (“[T]here’s a bit of a pileup of female rockers getting reflective this season.”) I smell a trend. Ladies, they be writing! The review mentions the fact that Harry’s “face is unlined” and talks about her “crisp red collared blouse with white polka dots and red leggings.” I think Bruce was wearing the exact same thing when they wrote their piece about him and Born to Run. How embarrassing.

Two weeks after Face It came out another musical icon released a memoir. Me by Elton John covers the singer’s childhood in the London suburb of Pinner, his early musical days in Los Angeles, his songwriting partnership with Bernie Taupin, successful solo career, and marriage and family with husband David Furnish. Keen celebrity memoir readers might also be quick to point out that the title of John’s memoir is the same as that of actress Katharine Hepburn’s. Is there anything men will not just unapologetically lay claim to?

The review mentions the fact that Harry’s “face is unlined” and talks about her “crisp red collared blouse with white polka dots and red leggings.” I think Bruce was wearing the exact same thing when they wrote their piece about him and “Born to Run.” How embarrassing.

While Rolling Stone’s book review name-checked Harry’s famous male friends in the headline, not surprisingly, John’s does not. “Elton John’s Me Is A Uniquely Revealing Pop Star Autobiography. The long-awaited book covers his hard childhood, struggles with addiction and road to recovery.” It ends with “Elton has never been one to hold back difficult truths, and Me — while a little skimpy on revelations about his brilliant, ground breaking music — is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the difficult road that he walked while creating it.”

Entertainment Weekly’s description of Me is also glowing: “While Me is as colorful as you’d expect from an artist famous for his outlandish stage costumes and outsize temper tantrums, it is also so much more than simply a dishy sex, drugs and, rock ‘n roll tell-all.” The Entertainment Weekly review shows that when it comes to male celebrity memoirs there may be sex and drugs, but no review should reduce their work to just these scandalous and juicy elements.

Can you feel the love tonight? Not yet? Never fear, here comes The Guardian to continue the praise. Their review opens with, “Choosing one’s favourite Elton John story – like choosing one’s favourite Elton song – can feel like limiting oneself to a mere single grape from the horn of plenty.” Reading reviews of the book you have to wonder if John is still standing because he is unable to sit down from all the ass kissing. The Daily Mail calls it “the rock memoir of the decade” while for The Washington Post it is an “unsparing, extravagantly funny new memoir” and “bracingly honest.” It’s hard to find criticism and scrutiny in the reviews of John’s work because there is not much negativity. John’s book is not better than Harry’s; in fact, I think Harry’s is much stronger. She’s more self-aware and can deconstruct the misconceptions and preconceptions that fans, the media, and other musicians have of her.

Can you feel the love tonight? Not yet? Never fear, here comes “The Guardian” to continue the praise.

“You think you’re being difficult, my little sausage? Have I ever told you about the time I drank eight vodka martinis, took all my clothes off in front of a film crew, and then broke my manager’s nose?” he writes of being a father reacting to his son’s temper tantrums. There are plenty of stories about famous friends like Stevie Wonder, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Andy Warhol, and Neil Young. The anecdotes leave readers feeling like they never get to peek behind the shiny veneer of the celebrity that is Elton John. At times it’s all surface and that’s fine, but reviewers do not criticize him for it in the same way they would if he were a woman.

John’s book reviews do talk of his well-documented addiction to cocaine (“If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly enough,” he writes), but they are quick to follow it up with redemption stories, which is a standard formula in memoirs written both by and about men.

“Now that he’s sober, there’s the more conservatively dressed, happily married elder statesman of British pop, a proper establishment figure,” writes The Guardian. Not only do they give him a redemption arc and treat his addiction very much like a phase, but they also give his addiction issues a free pass, writing “while his extraordinary talent justified his personal excesses, it is his self-awareness that has counterbalanced the narcissism and made him such a likable figure.”

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Redemption comes up often in male celebrity memoir coverage, but examine the media’s reaction to another celebrity memoir and it becomes painfully clear that this narrative is strictly for the boys.

Actress, producer, and director Demi Moore’s memoir Inside Out was released a few weeks before John’s. Moore and her book were soon all over the media and it was not for her redemption story. Like John, Moore struggled with addiction, but unlike John the media never lets her forget it, along with other parts of her story.

“Demi Moore drops shocking revelations about Ashton Kutcher, sexual assault and sobriety,” reads the headline of an L.A. Times piece about the memoir. The story proceeds to break down Moore’s childhood pain, her miscarriage, Ashton Kutcher cheating on her, and her struggles with alcohol and drugs.

Unlike In Touch Weekly, they skipped the “Ashton and Bruce Are in Good Places Too” sidebar because like with Debbie Harry, we cannot talk about Moore without mentioning the famous men in her life. More than one review talks about how Willis and Kutcher must feel about Demi airing their dirty laundry. Was Bruce mad? What does Ashton really think? Dude, where’s my sound bite?

Entertainment Weekly’s piece ran with the headline, “Celebrities react to Demi Moore’s revealing memoir Inside Out. From Jon Cryer’s affectionate follow-up to Ashton Kutcher’s cryptic non-response.” They forgot to add “male” in front of “celebrities” though as all the celebrities quoted in the piece were men. Also, if one more reviewer mentions how great Moore looks for her age, I will make them watch that awful scene in St. Elmo’s Fire where Rob Lowe’s character passionately details the origin story of St. Elmo’s Fire while performing pyrotechnics with a can of aerosol hairspray and a lighter on repeat until they beg me for mercy.

Also, if one more reviewer mentions how great Moore looks for her age, I will make them watch that awful scene in “St. Elmo’s Fire” where Rob Lowe’s character passionately details the origin story of St. Elmo’s Fire while performing pyrotechnics with a can of aerosol hairspray and a lighter on repeat until they beg me for mercy.

Most of Moore’s memoir coverage focused on the tabloid aspects of it. Read the headlines to see if you can spot a trend and how many you can read before you want to just set shit on fire (you can borrow Rob’s aerosol can).

“7 Biggest Bombshells From Demi Moore’s Explosive Memoir” (accessonline.com)

“Demi Moore: 8 Biggest Bombshells From Her Memoir Inside Out” (popculture.com, also, take that accessonline.com)

“Demi Moore’s raw Inside Out reveals rape, why marriage to Ashton Kutcher crumbled” (USA Today)

“Demi Moore Gets Real About Her Painful Childhood, Drugs, Ashton Kutcher and Other Exes in New Book ‘Inside Out‘” (Stay classy, Us Weekly)

“Why Demi Moore Fulfilled Ashton Kutcher’s Threesome Fantasies” (E! Online)

The unfortunate thing about these headlines, which would be vastly different if they were referencing a man’s memoir, is that, like Harry, they reduce Moore’s story to only its most scandalous and juicy elements. Moore got her acting start in 1981 as Jackie Templeton on General Hospital (Luke and Laura forever!), the number one show on daytime television at the time. She followed that up with roles in films like the Brat Pack bonanzas St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night.

Then she got what many, including Moore, consider to be a turning point in her career. “This could be either an absolute disaster, or it could be amazing,” she writes of reading the script for Ghost, which ended up being a big hit in 1990, grossing over $500 million. It was nominated for five Oscars and four Golden Globes, including a Golden Globes best actress nomination for Moore.

Moore followed the success of Ghost with A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal, and Striptease, a film for which she was offered over $12 million, an amount no other woman in Hollywood had ever received. Moore became the highest paid actress in Hollywood. “But instead of people seeing my big payday as a step in the right direction for women or calling me an inspiration, they came up with something else to call me: Gimmie Moore.” It is worth noting that at the time her husband Bruce Willis had just been paid $20 million for the third Die Hard movie. (Yippee ki yay indeed!)

“She became a movie star in this time where women didn’t naturally fit into the system,” said Gwyneth Paltrow, a friend of Moore’s, in the The New York Times piece on Inside Out. “She was really the first person who fought for pay equality and got it, and really suffered a backlash from it. We all certainly benefited from her,” says Paltrow.

And while it pains me greatly to side with someone who talks a lot about vagina steaming, Paltrow’s right. Moore is an inspiration and fighting for equal pay in Hollywood should be one of the things the media focuses on when they talk about Inside Out, but, sadly, it is not. It is unfortunate that when Moore is discussed it is in the context of Ashton Kutcher and threesomes, at the expense of the many other empowering and interesting parts of her life.

And while it pains me greatly to side with someone who talks a lot about vagina steaming, Paltrow’s right. Moore is an inspiration and fighting for equal pay in Hollywood should be one of the things the media focuses on when they talk about “Inside Out,” but, sadly, it is not.

Remember her iconic Vanity Fair cover? Shot in 1991 by Annie Leibovitz when Moore was seven months pregnant with her second daughter Scout, it’s considered one of the most influential magazine covers of all time. Legendary Esquire art director George Lois describes it as, “A brave image on the cover of a great magazine — a stunning work of art that conveyed a potent message that challenged a repressed society.” Let’s talk about that!

Or her intense training for her role in G.I. Jane, a 1997 film Moore both starred in and produced. “I was emotionally invested in the story, the message and the provocative questions it raised,” she says of the film. The film was panned by critics and Moore talks at length in Inside Out about her disappointment at the reception to a project that meant so much to her.

The parts of the book where Moore talks about Hollywood’s double standard, whether it be the pay gap or reactions to the age difference between her and Kutcher, are some of the best parts of the book. Unfortunately, they are the parts covered least.

The last line of Inside Out is, “we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how we hold both.” It is a great line for a memoir to end on, but in Moore’s case, while she may get to choose how she holds both, the media will only ever focus on the suffer part.

There is the emphasis on opening up, on fighting, on bravery, on revealing — “Demi Moore Lets Her Guard Down,” reads The New York Times headline. This is the way memoirs by women are positioned and even if it isn’t explicitly spelled out, it has become the expectation so much so that when female celebrities don’t expose themselves completely they are resented for it. The reception to Harry’ book Face It offers proof.

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Jessica Simpson released her memoir Open Book in February 2020. It reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list, but like Moore’s, Simpson’s book soon became tabloid fodder. “Jessica’s Shocking Confessions,” reads the headline on Star’s piece on the book, which focuses on Simpson’s struggles with drug and alcohol abuse and her famous exes from Nick Lachey to John Mayer. Like Moore, Simpson is now sober.

Simpson was signed to Columbia Records in 1997 at 17 as the label’s answer to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and went on to release six bestselling records. She also starred in the MTV reality show Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, which featured Simpson and then husband and 98 Degrees singer Nick Lachey, who at the time was the more successful of the two. If you don’t remember Lachey from MTV you might know him from his recent gig hosting Netflix’s Love is Blind where he greets contestants with “Obviously, I’m Nick Lachey,” which seems to overestimate his place in both pop culture’s canon and our general consciousness.

Newlyweds, a ratings success, aired for two years and while it made the couple a household name, it was Simpson who stole the show with her ditzy, dumb blonde antics. Her confusion over whether Chicken of the Sea was chicken or tuna earned her a place in both reality television and pop culture history. The most interesting parts of Open Book are when Simpson talks about her reality television persona and the identity crisis it led to. “How was I supposed to live a real healthy life filtered through the lens of a reality show? If my personal life was my work, and my work required me to play a certain role, who even was I anymore?” she writes.

Open Book is Simpson’s attempt to distance herself from her Newlyweds role and change perceptions of her, a common reason people write memoirs. Some get it —“You Remember Jessica Simpson, Right? Wrong,” reads the headline on The New York Times piece about her memoir — but, unfortunately, most of the reviewers discussing her book don’t. Simpson has moved beyond her Newlyweds character. She’s built a billion-dollar fashion and licensing business and is a mom to three kids, but the media seem uncomfortable embracing Simpson in her new roles, preferring to keep her forever stuck in 2003, in her UGG boots and pink Juicy Couture tracksuit, confused about tuna.

Simpson has moved beyond her “Newlyweds” character. She’s built a billion-dollar fashion and licensing business and is a mom to three kids, but the media seem uncomfortable embracing Simpson in her new roles, preferring to keep her forever stuck in 2003, in her UGG Boots and pink Juicy Couture tracksuit, confused about tuna.

Simpson talks about the effect this identity crisis had on her and her struggles with her weight and body image, as well as her sexual abuse at age 6, and her addiction to alcohol and pills. She started to increasingly rely on alcohol during her relationship with Mayer in 2006, insecure that she wasn’t smart enough to date Mayer. My heart breaks when I think of Simpson wasting time worried about being the intellectual equal of the man who gave us the musical depth that is “Your Body is a Wonderland” and later referred to sex with Simpson as “sexual napalm.”

It is also troubling that after talking about how Mayer brought out her insecurities, the media thinks it is a good idea to focus on Mayer’s reaction to Open Book. I know you thought you were never good enough for this guy and that he was always judging you, so let’s get him to judge you some more by asking what he thought of your book!

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Simpson’s attempts to challenge the dumb blonde perception of her are not the only example of a female celebrity going off script or off brand in their memoir and failing to give the media, and readers, what they want or expect. Singer and songwriter Liz Phair’s Horror Stories says “a memoir” on the front cover, but the book is more a collection of essays and stories by Phair than a straightforward linear memoir. Reviewers did not respond well to Phair’s artistic license with the storytelling form.

“It’s hard to tell the truth about ourselves. It opens us up to being judged and rejected,” Phair writes in Horror Stories and that may be one reason she chose to tell her story the way she did. Through stories about blizzards, blackouts (from lack of electricity, not drinking), marital infidelity, giving birth to her son, and getting dressed up to go to Trader Joe’s, Phair reveals a lot about herself and about identity, insecurity, fame, and regret. “In the stories that make up this book, I am trusting you with my deepest self,” she writes in the book’s prologue. Her deepest self just might be a bit harder to find for those fuck and run readers who are too busy complaining about the book’s nontraditional memoir style to actually read it.

Horror Stories does not talk a lot about her music, including Phair’s critically acclaimed, influential 1993 album Exile in Guyville. A song-by-song reply to the 1972 Rolling Stones album Exile on Main St., it was the number one album in year-end lists from Spin and The Village Voice and was rated the fifth best album of the 1990s by Pitchfork. “At the time, it was a landmark of foul-mouthed, comprised intimacy, a tortured confessional, a workout in female braggadocio, and a wellspring of penetrating self-analysis and audacity,” reads The New Yorker’s piece on the 20th anniversary of Exile in Guyville’s release.

“Frankness is Liz Phair’s brand. Her 1993 breakthrough album, the brilliant and profane Exile in Guyville, chronicled her post-college experiences in Chicago’s male-dominated music scene. Phair’s new memoir Horror Stories makes little mention of the album or her artistic life,” reads The Washington Post’s review. Remember how the Post thought that Bruce Springsteen did not need to write Born to Run because he had already revealed so much in his songs already? Why doesn’t Phair get the same consideration?

“Though there are anecdotes about flopping on live television and scrapping a record after learning of a collaborator’s abuse, the absence of concrete stories about Exile in Guyville is palpable,” writes Pitchfork. Just give us the hits, Liz! “Her relationship to music seems to have been the longest and maybe the most demanding love of her life, the one for which she has been willing to get lost, to fail, and to try again over and over for decades. Call me a selfish fan, but I have to say that is one story in all its horror and passion I would love to hear,” reads the review in The New York Times.

Reviewers spend so much time focused on what’s missing from Horror Stories that they miss what’s there. Well, maybe not all of what’s there. In chapter 14 of Horror Stories, called “Hashtag,” Phair writes about waking up one morning to headlines about the rock star who was supposed to produce her next album. Multiple women had come forward to accuse him of sexual harassment and emotional abuse. The FBI was also investigating him for exchanging sexually explicit communications with an underage fan.

Phair never specifically names Ryan Adams, but, in February 2019, seven months before Horror Stories was released, The New York Times broke the story about multiple women, including his ex-wife Mandy Moore, coming forward to accuse Adams of manipulative behavior, sexual misconduct, emotional and verbal abuse, and harassment.

In the chapter, Phair talks about her own experiences with sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalkers, and the sexism she experienced in the music industry. She writes about being instructed by a record label president to let radio programmers “feel her up a little” because it would help boost her career or about being told that she would never work again if she didn’t go along with sexy photo shoots. But her personal stories are not what the press focused on when she was promoting Horror Stories.

Phair was frequently asked about Adams and her experience working with him. “I don’t want every headline about this book that is so important to me to be about Ryan Adams,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. She becomes understandably annoyed with a male reporter from New York Magazine who asks her several questions about Adams, including one about his process as a producer. (I know when I hear about a man accused of sexual misconduct the first thing I wonder about is his artistic process.) “Out of everything in the book, why is the Ryan Adams thing such an interesting topic?” Phair asks him. “You’re not the only one singling out Ryan Adams as a hot talking point, and it’s sad. It does need to be talked about, but so do the larger issues.”

It’s unfortunate that Phair shares intimate details about herself, and her own experiences with sexual harassment and assault, and the media takeaway from that is that they don’t like the format of her book and would rather talk about the famous man in her life. Congrats on your book Liz, did Ryan ever send you inappropriate texts?

***

While Phair is criticized for not talking about what is expected of her in her memoir, men who follow the same course do not hear “how dare you?” The reaction to Acid for the Children, the 2019 memoir by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea (aka Michael Balzary), proves that.

Acid for the Children details Flea’s childhood growing up in Australia, his relationship with his older sister Karyn, his family’s move to the U.S. when he was 4, his first crush, how Kurt Vonnegut Jr. changed his life, and his love of basketball and the Sony Walkman. He talks about meeting Red Hot Chili Peppers lead singer Anthony Kiedis in 1976 at Fairfax High School, about learning to play bass, about his first band Anthym, about shooting coke and taking speed, his time in the California punk band FEAR, and about acting in the 1983 movie Suburbia. There are also lists of the concerts that changed his life, books that blew his mind, and movies that grew him. Lots of great material, right? You know what’s missing? Anything about the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the bestselling, Grammy-winning, Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Fame-inducted band he founded, plays bass in, and is most strongly associated with.

Flea’s book ends just as Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, what would later become the Red Hot Chili Peppers, play their first show at the Grandia Room in Los Angeles to 27 people in February 1983. This performance comes up on page 375 of the 385-page book. There’s no mention of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, his movie roles beyond Suburbia (My Own Private Idaho being one of his most famous), his role as a father of two girls, how he founded the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, or his work with other musicians from Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace to Alanis Morissette. (Flea played bass on “You Oughta Know,” her hit single from 1995’s Jagged Little Pill.)

The book is about Flea’s journey to the band, rather than with it. Surely, reviewers were as outraged by this omission, as they were when Phair failed to talk about Exile in Guyville in Horror Stories. It will not surprise you to know they were not bothered at all. Rather than focus on what was missing from Acid for the Children, the coverage focuses on what’s there and praise for it. Reviews focus on Flea’s gift and skill as a writer and fail to mention that if you want to dream of Californication, you will have to do that somewhere else. Reviewers can see, and appreciate, Flea as something other than just the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There is a very distinct set of rules female celebrities writing their memoirs must follow. The more tell all, the more trauma and the more tabloid, the better. They are not free to write about what they want. They must bare it all, page after page. Men like Flea have the freedom to operate by a very different set of rules. He can leave his scar tissue out and reviewers have no problem with it. Book coverage focuses on Flea the writer, rather than Flea the bassist. This same courtesy, and basic level of respect, is never extended to women telling their stories. Female celebrities like Debbie and Demi are never just human beings writing about their lives. Reviewers are unable to abandon their preconceived notions, their ideas of who these women are, their celebrity personas and just see them as people who should be allowed to tell their stories their way.

“[H]e’s actually a lovely writer, with a particular gift for the free-floating and reverberant. He writes in Beat Generation bursts and epiphanies, lifting toward the kind of virtuosic vulnerability and self-exposure associated with the great jazz players,” reads the review in The Atlantic.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly Flea said that his goal with Acid for the Children was that “it could be a book that could live beyond being a celebrity book or a rock star book and just stand on its own as a piece of literature.” I can only imagine the outrage if Debbie Harry wrote Face It and the book ended with, “And then I started this band Blondie. See you later!” Or if Demi Moore ended Inside Out with, “Then I got the part in this movie St. Elmo’s Fire. The end.” Or if Courtney Love wrote her memoir (please do this, Courtney) and the last page read, “And then I met this guy Kurt, but I have to go be the girl with the most cake now. Peace out.” The fact that Love and her accomplishments are forever tied to her husband is a whole other gender bias problem all together.

The book is about Flea’s journey to the band, rather than with it. Surely, reviewers were as outraged by this omission, as they were when Phair failed to talk about “Exile in Guyville” in “Horror Stories.” It will not surprise you to know they were not bothered at all.

Of course, Flea is not the first Red Hot Chili Pepper to give it away in a celebrity memoir. In 2004, lead singer Anthony Kiedis wrote Scar Tissue, a New York Times bestseller about his life, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and his time in and out of rehab, as well as in and out of various women. If you have ever thought, “I bet Anthony Kiedis does well with the ladies but would really like to get a better sense of his success rate,” then this is the book for you. In his memoir Kiedis gets away with writing about debauchery, depravity, and drug abuse in a way that reads like a Behind the Music episode on steroids. (See any book by a current or past member of Mötley Crüe or Guns N’ Roses for a further look at this style.) A woman would never get away with writing about drugs like Kiedis does.

When women write about their addiction there’s an apologetic, self-aware tone male memoirs don’t have: “I know I am a drug addict, and I keep messing up, but I’m really sorry, and please stick with me cause I am gonna sort this out.” (See How To Murder Your Life by fashion and beauty journalist Cat Marnell and More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction from Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, who passed away in 2020, for great examples of this.) Also, I would like to point out the blurbs on the backs of Scar Tissue by Kiedis and How To Murder Your Life by Marnell in case you still doubt there’s a gender bias when it comes to how celebrity memoirs are received.

“Hot Bukowski” —Rolling Stone on Marnell

“A frank, unsparing, meticulous account of a life lived entirely on impulse, for pleasure, and for kicks” —Time on Kiedis

Oh, and, if you’re reading this and in charge of greenlighting Red Hot Chili Pepper memoirs can you please get John Frusciante working on his? Frusciante is known for talking at length about both his connection to spirits (he might already have a ghostwriter!) and different dimensions and worlds. If there’s a book by a band member to be written this is the one.

It is also impossible to talk about Flea’s book without mentioning the title, which comes from the song by a band called Too Free Stooges. A man can get away with calling his memoir Acid for the Children, while a woman certainly cannot. I would like to see Demi Moore title her memoir Whippets for the Wee Ones and see how far she gets. If I look at memoir titles by women on my bookshelves there is Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, The Girl in the Back by 1970s drummer Laura Davis-Chanin, Girl in a Band by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, and Not That Kind of Girl by actress and Girls creator Lena Dunham.

A man can get away with calling his memoir “Acid for the Children,” while a woman certainly cannot. I would like to see Demi Moore title her memoir “Whippets for the Wee Ones” and see how far she gets.

All the titles mention “girl” as if there is a need to announce that early on and get it out of the way, before the book has even been opened. Let us compare these with titles of the celebrity memoirs by dudes that I own. There’s Life by Keith Richards, Slash by Slash, The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx, and In the Pleasure Groove by John Taylor. I do not know what the pleasure groove is, but I do hope it is also the name of the kick-ass yacht in Duran Duran’s “Rio” video.

***

Acid for the Children is not the only recent celebrity memoir by a man to resist the traditional memoir style and not receive criticism for it, although in the case of singer and songwriter Prince’s The Beautiful Ones, named for the song from Purple Rain, it’s understandable why it lacks the typical style of a life story given that its subject died just one month after the book’s publication was announced.

“He wanted to write the biggest music book in the world, one that would serve as a how-to-guide for creatives, a primer on African American entrepreneurship and a ‘handbook for the brilliant community,’” he told Dan Piepenbring, an editor at The Paris Review, who was writing the book with Prince. Notoriously private, to the point that reporters were not allowed to record their interviews, many were surprised Prince would want to write his life story at all. He wanted his book contract to state he could pull it from shelves if he felt the work no longer reflected him, which just seems like a very Prince thing to do.

Prince had completed just 30 handwritten pages before he died of an accidental fentanyl overdose on April 21, 2016. The pages detailed his childhood and his early days as a musician. Piepenbring returned to Prince’s Paisley Park compound months after the singer’s death to find additional material that could be used in the book. This material includes personal photos, drawings, song lyrics, and a handwritten synopsis of Purple Rain, Prince’s 1984 film that marked his acting debut. The addition of personal artifacts to round out the story means The Beautiful Ones is more scrapbook than memoir. “The Beautiful Ones does not offer a clear-eyed view of who Prince really was — he would have hated that, but it illuminates more than it conceals,” reads The Washington Post’s piece on the memoir.

Reading reviews of The Beautiful Ones, I wondered if the book would have even been finished and released if Prince were a woman or would it have been indefinitely shelved because of the death of its star. Maybe it would have focused on the singer’s drug use, final days, death, and the reaction to his death. The media has a way of making a female celebrity’s story about her death, not her life, which was noticeably lacking when the media talked about Prince and The Beautiful Ones.“It’s up to us to take what’s there and make something out of it for ourselves, creating, just as Prince wanted,” said NPR in their piece on the memoir. Prince’s life ended with respect and a beautiful tribute in book form, and glowing reviews for it. This respect is definitely missing when we pay tribute to female celebrities who have died. Their deaths provide another opportunity for the media to pick them apart and let their scandals overshadow their contributions. Following Prince’s death there were no pieces like the gossip-heavy Vanity Fair piece from 2012 on the late singer and actress Whitney Houston, “The Devils in the Diva,” which “investigates Houston’s final days: the prayers and the parties, the Hollywood con artist on the scene, and the message she left behind.” Or the, at times, less-than-respectful movies made about female celebrities after their deaths that focus more on their personal lives and troubles than they do on their art. Even in death, women like Houston and Amy Winehouse are still expected to bare all even though they are no longer with us.

This year will give us new memoirs from actresses Sharon Stone, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Julianna Margulies, as well as singers Brandi Carlile and Billie Eilish. We are also getting a Stanley Tucci memoir and I think we can all agree he is the sexiest bald man (sorry, Prince William). Women are not just turning to books to tell their truths, with recent documentaries from the likes of Paris Hilton and Demi Lovato giving female celebrities the opportunity to tell their truths, clear up misconceptions, and control the narratives around their lives. We can only hope the way these stories are received starts to change, and that women can be free to tell their stories the way they want to (embrace your inner Flea, ladies!) without fear of negative reviews, sexist reviews, or questions about Ryan Adams’ artistic process. And please, no one ask John Mayer for his opinion.

***

Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. Her writing about arts, pop culture, feminism, mental health, and why we should all be nicer to Lindsay Lohan has appeared in a variety of magazines.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

The State We Are In: Neither Here, There, nor in Heaven

Image courtesy of Madhushree Ghosh. Illustration by Carolyn Wells.

Madhushree Ghosh | Longreads | May 2021 | 16 minutes (4,261 words)

Seventeen years ago, I receive the call most immigrants dread. It is inevitable, and yet. The call announces that my Baba, my indefatigable, extroverted, positively enthusiastic father, was felled by a massive cardiac arrest. On a heart that was the most giving one among all the people I’ve known. Life in America at that second continues without a ripple. Only, my life changes, divided into before-the-call and after-the-call.

I ask my now-ex. “Will you come with me?” — like a child.

Awkwardly, he says, “Do you want me to?” — like he has an option and he could escape this uncomfortable moment. I call him my now-ex for a reason.

“My Baba is dead,” I say mournfully. As if saying it over and over would make it real. It wasn’t real. It still isn’t.

Journalist Aman Sethi talks about the burning funeral pyres that light up India’s cremation grounds in the New York Times. With over 300,000 new daily infections and over 21,000 dead in the last week in April, the pyres are lit in the parking lots of crematoriums. Author Rani Neutill writes about the pyres and her own journey back to cremate her mother five years ago. We both acknowledge these images transport us back to our own trauma of losing our parents, our loved ones. PTSD all over again.

***

On an August evening last year, now Vice President Harris tells the world, “Family is my uncles, my aunts and my chittis.” — as she accepts the Democratic nomination. I — and I am sure, millions of Indians, Indian Americans like me — weep with unbridled joy. To me, this kvelling was surprising, because I didn’t realize the depth of unbelonging I had felt. I have lived in America longer than in India, my birth country. I’m not even Tamil, and yet, that word, “chitti” — younger sister of an aunt, mausi, mashi, moushi in other Desi languages — reverberates in bursts of validation all through our immigrant communities. Two months later, author, host, and activist Padma Lakshmi notes what that ripple effect would be when a woman of color is vice president. Padma articulates what we all felt — we may not agree with everything Vice President Harris said/did, but we do like what she represents. We are hopeful.

As Indian Americans who have lived most of our lives outside our birth country, we abide by unwritten rules. We work hard, we internalize racism by being “model” immigrants. We follow American rules and norms, in effect, we try to create very large waves of “good immigrants.” We sympathize with other people of color but try not to draw too much attention to ourselves, except when we are excelling at academics, Spelling Bees, or inventions. To say we have internalized our colorism and racism is minimizing what we feel — we try so hard to “fit in.”

***

For Hindus, death is the final stage of life, the next journey where the soul travels different levels of earth, the nether lands, and on to heaven. The concept of reincarnation is an idea one grows up on, even if we have moved far away from it.

It takes me almost 36 hours to get to my Baba. A layover in Kuala Lumpur watching a somewhat famous Bollywood star hamming it up for his fans in the lounge, waiting for Didi, my sister to join at the airport connection area, both of us now fatherless, rudderless. I do not remember those 36 hours. I remember every moment of those 36 hours.

In the lounge, waiting for Didi, my sister to join at the airport connection area, both of us now fatherless, rudderless. I do not remember those 36 hours. I remember every moment of those 36 hours.

When we reach Chittaranjan Park, the Bengali neighborhood of middle-class former refugees of the 1947 Partition of India, my Ma is already waiting, eyes swimming in tears, but a hopeful smile on her tired lips. Her daughters are home. She isn’t alone in her grief anymore.

The house is filled with neighbors and strangers. Everyone looks at Didi and me, expecting us to collapse, weep, wail, because only a frantic acknowledgment of loss matters to the neighbors. Didi and I don’t cry, though we hug our Ma despite us not being a hugging family.

The neighbors want to know, “Who will give mukhagni?” — only menfolk are allowed to go with the dead to the cremation grounds. Only sons or designated male family members are allowed to light the pyre, mukhagni (adding fire to the mouth of the dead). Women are second-class, not permitted. Women are to bear children — souls may get attached to them when they return from the cremation grounds — not allowed, not allowed.

Didi tells the crowd and to no one in particular, “Ma will give mukhagni. We will be there with her.”

I hear the collective soft gasp of horror. But no one says anything. The Ghosh daughters are foreign-returned, with Western ideas. They don’t see how wrong this is. How men and women aren’t equal.

We have my father to cremate. We have no time to worry about what the neighbors think.

We have my father to cremate. We have no time to worry about what the neighbors think.

***

In a country that brought in immigrants and slaves for centuries, Indians are the “good” ones, who are still shocked in the ‘80s when the Dotbusters attack them in Jersey City. “We are Americans too,” we say, the hatred is incomprehensible.

Post-9/11, the first immigrant to be gunned down in Mesa, Arizona, isn’t a Muslim but a Sikh. Balbir Singh Sodhi is killed at the gas station he managed by a man who didn’t want “towel heads” in his country. As Indians who give up their birth country’s citizenship when we become U.S. citizens, we gulp down that discrimination, that unnamed fear, to pay taxes, buy property, wave the U.S. flag, vote in elections, because we have earned it. We are model citizens, even when we remain entwined with what our birth country does. What we become is casual observers of what’s happening in “desh,” but very involved in the American way of life. We choose, because we are made to.

***

As the years go by in a country not our own, we spend time teaching non-Indians what India represents. Soon it is descriptions of the festivals, the cuisines, the food, our saris, politics, and minimizing how much cricket is a religion. We minimize because it’s easier to do that than push Americans to explore cultures other than American. We minimize sports, religion, food, life.


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But then, when we interact with Indians in India, our attitudes are of condescension toward those we left behind, mixed with cultural respect for elders as we were taught. We roll our eyes at WhatsApp Good Mornings and rose gifs from family and classmates pinging at midnight. We send back things like Costco cashews, or thick socks for the family, and college advice for future generations. We are stuck in the decade we left desh — for me it’s the ‘90s, the advent of Madhuri, Rani, Shahrukh, and revenge movies.

We still hate the social media forwards, but surreptitiously sign up for Signal because the WhatsApp gang told us to. However, we dare not leave the high school group of middle-aged classmates because they connect us to our long lost childhood. We post pictures of dishes we’ve created during the pandemic, but secretly, we crave the spicy paapri-chaat mix of crunchy goodness from the stall next to the bus stop at Delhi University. We scroll online sites for the Desi dhurrie, spices, fabrics. We’re more up to date with the politics from desh than ever.

After a few decades in America, we miss the things we consider ours. We may return “home,” armed with U.S. citizenship because we have the freedom to do so. But lately, we go home, not because we can afford to but because we’ve reached a stage in life where our people are getting older, sick, or dying. Guilt that we abandoned our parents, our extended family, our home for better lives in America, is what usually guides us back. But even then, we visit for two weeks at most, because work in America beckons like an angry, righteous, and indignant spouse.

But lately, we go home, not because we can afford to but because we’ve reached a stage in life where our people are getting older, sick, or dying. Guilt that we abandoned our parents, our extended family, our home for better lives in America, is what usually guides us back.

***

In 2004 when Didi and I get to the Lodhi cremation grounds, we are part of a handful waiting. The priest and the “body handlers” ask for cash to expedite the services. They speak only with the menfolk who accompany us. When we go in, with Baba — his body clad in a new dhoti and kurta hurriedly bought to make him look good on his last journey on a flat wooden bed covered with marigolds and rajnigandha — Baba looks like he’s sleeping. We sprinkle him with his favorite aftershave, as if we want him to arrive at the heavenly gates like it’s his first day at his new job.

We sprinkle him with his favorite aftershave, as if we want him to arrive at the heavenly gates like it’s his first day at his new job.

The priest says the prayers that guide the soul on its journey. They ask us to throw flowers at the body. They sprinkle ghee all the while chanting shlokas that mean nothing to us. Then they ask Ma to hold a bunch of incense, and place them on Baba. She does, howling, because among the Ghosh survivors, she knows what comes next. They light camphor and place it near Baba’s head. Handing a small fragrant sandalwood piece, they tell Ma, “Isko yahaan lagaaiyeh.” — put this here, pointing at Baba’s chest. I know they mean his mouth. Mukhagni. Fire to the mouth.

Handing a small fragrant sandalwood piece, they tell Ma, “Isko yahaan lagaaiyeh.” — put this here, pointing at Baba’s chest. I know they mean his mouth. Mukhagni. Fire to the mouth.

Ma does that. Didi and I hold her between us. Those cries haunt me. They will haunt me till I die. The wood bier trundles away from us as if he’s on a makeshift train ride. I did not realize that would be the last time I’ll see Baba. The crematorium fire roars like a hungry dragon at the far end. Baba enters the flames, the orange fire taking over our world.

That is the last time my family is together.

***

The Great Pause has thrown that nostalgia out like trash. The vaccines cannot be developed fast enough. Being part of the scientific community gives me the privilege of receiving the Moderna vaccine within the first month of 2021. I haven’t seen my extended family and friends in India for over three years — life, then work, and then the pandemic happened. Staying alive in a pandemic has been the reason to stay put.

My life, as it is for many of us immigrants, revolves around phone calls to India early on weekend mornings. India, roughly half a day ahead of us, is also used to those calls. There were times when those calls were short, maybe 10 minutes, our eyes on the clock indicating the $2/minute price on a calling card. Not anymore. Our privilege is calling our cousin for a masur dal vada recipe. Our privilege is us tweeting anti-Indian government comments without concern for whether our families will be harassed by Modi-bhakts. Our privilege is that we are Americans and our bravado too, is American.

***

India watches us in 2020 grappling with the virus racing through New York, L.A., Texas, and Florida like the California fires usually ravage our canyons, jumping highways, towns, and roads resembling acrobatic dragons.

“Ah, we can’t afford shutdowns. We had the BCG vaccine, we’re immune,” my former classmates say, noting why the TB vaccine may lead to a lower coronavirus infection rate.

The first wave doesn’t phase India. It’s Modi’s India — brash, young, arrogant, and complacent. In May 2021, the Lancet notes the government’s response of “[f]ully opening society with unrestrained crowding, mass gatherings, large scale travel, and lack of personal protective measures such as masks” gave the public a false sense of healthcare and vaccine security — that the pandemic had passed India by, much like the first wave.

Madhushree Ghosh’s high school classmates.

During the first and many waves in America meanwhile, we stay home. “Hunkering down” is a phrase I never want to hear again. Then religious places, movie theaters, stores, and restaurants shut down. The owners and workers protest.

Our Indian families and friends find the outrage amusing, “Ah, you’re all such rule-followers!” The condescension we had shown Indians as green card holders, as Indians who’d escaped to a better life, returns against us with a vengeance. The public, our extended families, and friends laugh at our caution.

“Yes, but this will contain the virus,” I counter.

“Sure, but in India, we’re so many people, nothing will work. We’re done with the pandemic here, Madhu,” my WhatsApp classmates opine.

***

During the first wave, in 2020 at the end of March, a 21-day lockdown is established by the Modi government to curb the virus. Over 120 million migrant workers left stranded, walk back to their villages and homes, making it a migration ten times larger than when Hindus and Muslims moved between British-divided India and Pakistan during the 1947 Partition. The Desis who can stay home are the privileged ones.

Indian-Americans have our own lockdown issues to handle. Beside a few articles, tweets, prayers, and thoughts, we don’t worry about the migrants. A very well-known American activist tells me that Americans get “crisis-fatigued” quickly, and not to expect them to think much about issues outside of America.

During a WhatsApp call, architect and high-school friend Anuj Arya says, “Migrants who I’ve worked with as daily wage construction workers, can’t survive without their wages. If they live in a 20X20 foot space with 10 more people, one of them getting COVID means the rest of them do too.”

He adds, “A COVID QPCR test is 1500 rupees (about $20). It’s beyond their reach.”

***

When the second wave hits India in April 2021, no one is prepared. Not the government. Not the healthcare system. Not the people.

When the second wave hits India in April 2021, no one is prepared. Not the government. Not the healthcare system. Not the people.

A country of 1.3 billion is now gasping for air. By April 21st, 2021, the oxygen requirement is over 8000 metric tons per day. India, as per the government, produces 7127 tons daily. People aren’t dying because of the virus. The COVID-compromised patients are dying of suffocation.

***

We sit outside the crematorium in October, watching Baba’s remains burn at high heat. The chimney above the oven spews out hot carbon air.

“That’s my Baba in the air,” I think, feeling nothing.

A few hours later they call us.

They tell us, “Hold your palms to receive the ashes.”

Didi and I hold the clay matka with the ashes and bones. It is harsh, real, immediate. There aren’t pretty urns priced according to your financial ability. It’s a reddish clay pot, with gray ashes. A priest-helper adds, “Yeh dekhiya, your babuji’s nerves are connected at the nabhi.”

Baba’s nerves are knotted near the navel — which never burns completely. This is why Hindu philosophy says we are connected to our ancestors through our nabhi, navel. This is added to a separate dish, covered with another clay plate. We are to take it to the Ganges, the holy river that will connect my father’s soul to the gods. Much as we don’t believe any of it, we do what we are told to.

Didi and I head to the Yamuna river in her best friend’s car. My father’s ashes rest on my lap. The clay pot is still hot from the crematorium. It is surreal and yet, here we are. Here we are.

We get out of the car close to the Yamuna, a tributary that connects to the Ganges. The river is thick with grease, decaying animal corpses, feces, and industrial effluents. The smell is nauseating and yet, Hindu religion tells us this river will connect Baba to the gods. And who are we to deny that?

The river is thick with grease, decaying animal corpses, feces, and industrial effluents. The smell is nauseating and yet, Hindu religion tells us this river will connect Baba to the gods. And who are we to deny that?

Ma gets out of the other car, her arthritis makes her older than she is. She waits silently for us as Didi and I climb over rocks slick with dirt, shit, and dead animals. Didi looks ahead, one step at a time, no words. I follow. This isn’t what Baba would have wanted. This is all we can give him.

The priest stands next to us, chanting hymns. “Put the ashes here,” he points.

Didi lets the pot float. We have the nabhi in its clay dish. He points at it and tells me to throw it inside the turgid river. I do.

“Walk, walk! Don’t look back,” the priest says like we are suddenly in an adventure movie.

It must have something to do with the soul latching onto live people. I don’t know. I don’t care. I want to look back, but I don’t.

At the car, my now-ex says, “Uff, that river sucks, doesn’t it?” — like a naïve American would.

I ignore him. My Baba is dead.

***

Twelve months after the first wave, before the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela encourages millions to congregate at Haridwar, near the Ganges river bank, the B.1.617 double mutant is already circulating among the people. The Mela is held every 12 years, but the Hindutva nationalist government appeases Hindu astrologers to allow a super spreader event to happen a year earlier. On April 1st, millions descended. The Mela was stopped two weeks later. A double mutant with an exponentially increased infectivity rate has now taken over the entire country — larger metropolitan cities like Delhi reached a COVID positivity rate of 30% in 12 days. Only 9% of the total population has been vaccinated.

On WhatsApp group messages, I now see posts about where one can buy more oxygen, or how to kill the virus by drinking water. Vaccine hesitancy, and misinformation circulates as rampantly as the virus through uneducated guesses, pro-government media rumor mills, and government silence on the total failure of the hospital and healthcare system. There’s a vaccine shortage which was expected to abate by May 1. It hasn’t.

A month ago, citizens and the Indian government were complacent enough to not mandate masks, nor ban large gatherings. The political rallies to pander to the public and gain votes took place like 2021 was a normal year.

***

On my high-school and middle-school WhatsApp groups, there are no rose gifs anymore, nor are there midnight pings of “Good morning!” The threads are somber, humming with stress, slow panic, and calls for help. The only requests are pleas for oxygen cylinders and hospital beds in Delhi suburbs. We hear of patients gasping for breath in hospital hallways and parking lots, dying in ambulances. Neighbors help neighbors cremate their loved ones.

A relative dies in Hyderabad and his family waits for hours to get the paperwork completed before he is hurriedly cremated. Crematoriums and cemeteries operate beyond capacity. Families wait for hours at cremation grounds in lines snaking through Noida and Ghaziabad to cremate their own. The Noida Hindon crematorium sets 14 funeral pyre platforms on the sidewalk for the COVID-19 dead to perform the last rites there instead. Dead and dying line hospital pathways. There is no respite.

***

Meanwhile in America, for us, India feels like what New York did in 2020. But Modi continues to punt to states to determine healthcare logistics, while he and his administration have created one of the largest humanitarian crises in this pandemic. On Twitter, we watch an interesting trend of the entire world going about their lives as Indians gasp for breath. It’s as if India isn’t a country that needs to be helped. We hear that the U.S. government didn’t allow for vaccine raw materials to reach India but the blame lies with the internal decisions made at the Indian government level.

We see “trauma porn” photos of funeral pyres burning through the night skies in India. The Western world watches those images over and over, and the Western people react to it. This is showing TV ads of malnourished African babies for us to donate instantly. This is Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” playing for animal shelters and pulling at our heartstrings.

But where does one donate? Does it go to the PM Cares Fund, run by the nationalist Prime Minister with no way of knowing how your money was used? Where there is no guarantee that the money reaches the migrants dying hungry, or the patients waiting for oxygen or Remdesivir?

I wonder if daughters were able to accompany their dead father’s body to the pyre. The cremations are taking place morning through sundown. Overworked priests are charging more. The lower-class Dalit funeral grounds helpers work round the clock, as do the hospital ward workers, the caregivers. Are the family members able to pay their last respects like I was able to? Do they know if the dignity expected of the dead was given to theirs?

***

Hospitals shouldn’t be overburdened. Oxygen supplies should have been available. Vaccines in the world’s largest manufacturing country, should be, well, available. And yet, the latest news cycle asks not to blame but to unite, to blame America for holding the raw materials for vaccine production instead. It’s easier to hate the Western country, hand-wave over the flouting of social distancing rules, because religion and elections are more important than gasping-for-breath Indians.

***

As an Indian who is a U.S. citizen, the guilt I feel is one that paralyzes me. I have abandoned my country of birth to choose the country of citizenship for personal material gain. Of that I am sure. How am I to assuage this guilt? The American way is to donate. But where do I donate? Not to the government that has systematically pushed against unity, religious, and caste freedom creating a Hindutva country. What do I do? How do I amplify this without tokenizing Indian grief?

We hold onto phone calls, reach out to friends, family members, find out ways, or “jugaad” as we call it in India, to make sure our people are safe. Others want to donate, but don’t know how. They See Blue GA circulates a Google doc of places that’ll accept our dollars. We want to do anything, something, something to help. Because if we can’t help, and if we can’t be there, and if we can’t do anything, the guilt we’ve always felt as Indians who became Americans will be fueled enough to rage on further.

As immigrants who love this country, we are grateful for the privilege and we also love our birth country that’s in such hell. Behind the scenes, my group of Desi authors text each other bemoaning the state we are in, neither in desh/home, nor in heaven. COVID is definitely a stark reminder of the choices we made. Feeling guilty is our state of being, besides a state of exhaustion and fear.

It’ll take India decades to recover from this and I am but a bystander, whether I like it or not.

Twitter asks about the use of funeral pyres and how disrespectful it is — do you not rage when they do this to your people, Twitter asks. No, I say, no — because what is disrespectful is how and why Indians are dying.

It takes President Biden two weeks before he does a U-turn and announces millions of AstraZeneca vaccine doses to be routed to India. Two weeks, with thousands dying daily. America and American leaders are silent. Only with social media outrage, behind-the-scenes negotiations lead to Biden behaving like the leader he says he is. Those pyres speak much more than the world’s largest humanitarian country. Are those photos disrespectful? Not if they coaxed my country of choice to act like the leader it says it is.

***

I hope Vice President Harris comments, perhaps shows solidarity with the country her mother comes from. It isn’t her job, but I’d like to think her chittis would be doubly proud of her if she did.

Right now, as an Indian American, the guilt propels me to doomscroll like I did with other Americans last year. Now I call my friends, and I tell them, “Stay safe,” like it’s a mantra that’ll save them all when their government has failed them.

My Baba’s cremation has stayed with me for decades since he left. The families losing their loved ones can’t even touch their dead as they’re whisked to the cremation grounds. COVID-19 has destroyed life in ways unimaginable.

The guilt I feel, buzzes like a loud bee.

***

Madhushree Ghosh‘s work has received an Honorable Mention in Best American Essays in Food Writing. Her work is Pushcart-nominated, and has been published in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Longreads, the Rumpus, Catapult, Hippocampus, Atlas Obscura, Unearth Women, Panorama, Garnet News, DAME, and others. As a woman in science, an immigrant, and daughter of refugees, her work reflects her roots and her activism. Her food narrative, “Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey” is forthcoming Spring 2022 from University of Iowa Press. She can be reached @writemadhushree.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Lisa Whittington-Hill

 

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Lost Album, Human Highway

CSNY, January 1, 1970. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

David Gambacorta | Longreads | March 2021 | 15 minutes (4,190 words)

They needed a song, but not just any song. It had to be a throat-clearing, lapel-grabbing, hey-what’s-that-sound number that could open what was shaping up to be one of the most anticipated albums of 1970: the debut of the super group to end all super groups, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. “We don’t have that song where you know that a listener will not take that needle off the record,” Graham Nash told Stephen Stills sometime in the fall of 1969, after they’d already labored for countless hours in a recording studio in San Francisco. “We need that song where we’ve got them from the very beginning.”

Nash, a skinny, shaggy former member of the British group The Hollies, and Stills, a soulful, straw-haired survivor of Buffalo Springfield, knew plenty about grabbing listeners by the ear. A year earlier, they’d discovered — at Joni Mitchell’s house in California, maybe, or Cass Elliot’s, no one’s quite sure — that they could create heavenly harmonies with David Crosby, the ex-Byrds singer who wore a droopy mustache, and the amused grin of a man who was in on some cosmic joke. They released an album, Crosby, Stills & Nash, that was filled with instant classics like the soaring “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Then, at the urging of Ahmet Ertegun, the owlish Atlantic Records honcho, the trio turned themselves into a quartet, adding — with some reluctance — Neil Young’s reedy voice, barbed-wire guitar playing, and unpredictability to the mix. After the four of them played in front of 400,000 swaying, stoned people at Woodstock, their own concerts started to take on the feel of what Rolling Stone described as “mini-Woodstocks” that unleashed “effortless good vibes.”

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“I Was at a Loss for Any Facts that Would Actually Stick”: An Investigative Reporter on Losing His Mom to QAnon

WASHINGTON, DC—JANUARY 06: Crowds gather outside the U.S. Capitol for the Stop the Steal rally. Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images.

I Miss My Mom,” Jesselyn Cook’s HuffPost piece, is another read on losing a parent to QAnon.

At Buzzfeed News, Albert Samaha recounts his unsuccessful efforts to pull his mom out of QAnon. She had been an early adopter of the far-right conspiracy theory and has believed, since 2018, that Donald Trump is the anointed one — a savior in a war between good and evil. By 2020, it was clear to Samaha that there was no longer any “overlap between [their] filters of reality,” and he had given up trying to argue with her over basic, indisputable facts. After all, in her eyes, he was a dangerous member of the “liberal media” — a journalist of the “evil deep state.”

In the piece, Samaha traces his mother’s journey to QAnon, first explaining how she came to the U.S. from the Philippines and was initially indifferent to politics. But that changed during the 2000 presidential election, and in that race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, she “saw the candidates as pieces on God’s chessboard.” Later, she would declare her support for Barack Obama, but that period, writes Samaha, “turned out to be the final chapter of [their] political alignment.”

Meanwhile, she wondered where she’d gone wrong with me. Was it letting me go to public school instead of Catholic school? Subscribing to cable TV channels operated by the liberal media? Raising me in Northern California? She regretted not taking politics more seriously when I was younger. I’d grown up blinkered by American privilege, trained to ignore the dirty machinations securing my comforts. My mom had shed that luxury long ago.

She was a primary school student, living in a big house in the suburbs of Manila in 1972 when President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in response to a series of bombings across the capital and an assassination attempt on the defense secretary, which he blamed on communist insurgents. But Marcos had actually orchestrated the attacks as justification for his authoritarian turn — a plot exposed only years later. The successful conspiracy ushered the Philippines into a dictatorship that jailed dissidents, embezzled public funds, and installed a bribe-based bureaucracy my grandparents refused to participate in. Having a hard head runs in the family. To this day, my aunties and uncles debate if they would have been better off had their parents just given in to the new rules of the game.

The year my mom began falling down QAnon rabbit holes, I turned the age she was when she first arrived in the States. By then, I was no longer sure that America was worth the cost of her migration. When the real estate market collapsed under the weight of Wall Street speculation, she had to sell our house at a steep loss to avoid foreclosure and her budding career as a realtor evaporated. Her near–minimum wage jobs weren’t enough to cover her bills, so her credit card debts rose. She delayed retirement plans because she saw no path to breaking even anytime soon, though she was hopeful that a turnaround was on the horizon. Through the setbacks and detours, she drifted into the arms of the people and beliefs I held most responsible for her troubles.

In the early afternoon of Jan. 6, a piece of shrapnel landed in my text message inbox: photos of my mom and an uncle among a crowd of Trump supporters in front of the state capitol in Sacramento.

Outraged, I texted them both a righteous screed proclaiming my disappointment with how irresponsible they were, gathering with maskless faces even as COVID cases surged in California — and for what? It was one thing for my mother to risk her life at campaign rallies, but now she was doing so on the basis of a lie, a lie that only seemed to gain momentum. Would it ever end? Would my mother spend the rest of the pandemic bouncing from rally to rally, calling for an overthrow of a democratically elected government, breathing in the angry shouts of mask-averse white people who probably would’ve preferred she go back to the Philippines if not for the pink MAGA hat confirming her complicity?

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Shelved: Dr. Dre’s Detox

Chelsea Lauren / Getty Images for BET

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | March, 2021 | 6 minutes (1,743 words)

 

Dr. Dre’s Detox might be the best-known album that no one’s ever heard in its entirety. The legendary hip-hop producer’s supposed third album persisted in the public’s mind for 13 years, kept alive by rumors, leaks, and revised release dates. After first announcing the record in 2002, Dre finally admitted in 2015 that Detox was shelved because he “didn’t like it.” It’s probably just as well, because no album made by actual, fallible people ­— no matter how talented — could live up to such breathless, protracted hype.

Detox didn’t begin as an empty promise. We do have a few singles from the project to listen to, including “I Need A Doctor,” featuring Eminem and Skylar Grey, released in 2011.

 

 

Dre has apologized for physically abusing female partners — something that goes beyond the misogyny common in early ’90s hip hop — but only in a career as accomplished as his could such an epic dashing of hope become a footnote. Responsible for dozens, if not hundreds, of millions of records sold, Dre is a rapper, producer, actor, and music industry entrepreneur — a musical architect who defined a generation of expression. He was a member of seminal rap group N.W.A. in the 1980s. He co-founded Death Row Records after that — almost single-handedly inventing the West Coast G-funk style in the process — produced Snoop Doggy Dogg, 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar, and Eminem, to name a few, and founded Aftermath Entertainment and Beats Electronics. Responsible for game-changing albums The Chronic (1992) and 2001 (1999), Dre has nothing to prove by producing the rumored Detox.

The most interesting thing about Detox is not what it would have sounded like had it been released, but its relationship to its creator. What compelled Dre to keep working on it year after year? How, for a record that was probably never even completed, much less issued, did it become so monolithic in the minds of his fans?

Born Andre Romelle Young in Compton, California in 1965, Dre had his first local hit with the World Class Wreckin’ Cru at age 19.

L.A. is the place for you to be

To witness Dr. Dre in surgery

He has a PhD in mixology

To cut on the wheels so viciously

One year later, in 1987, Dre helped design gangsta rap with N.W.A.. Songs like “Fuck Tha Police” from 1988s Straight Outta Compton talked openly about police brutality. Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy E did most of the rapping. DJ Yella and Dre designed the beats. The music was apolitical, explicit, angry, hedonistic, and unrepentant. It set up California as home to the most innovative hip-hop of the next decade.

Dre left N.W.A. in 1991 and formed Death Row Records with Suge Knight the following year. His debut album, The Chronic, made with the help of Snoop Dogg and The Lady of Rage (among others) went triple platinum. Dre won a Grammy for “Let Me Ride.” He also was Death Row’s in-house producer, responsible for Dogg’s massively successful Doggystyle as well as acting as the supervising producer for the Above the Rim soundtrack.

Parting ways with the notorious Knight, Dre formed Aftermath Entertainment, a boutique rap label, in 1996. After a shaky start, the label signed Detroit rapper Eminem. His The Slim Shady LP was certified quadruple platinum. Dre’s second solo album, 1999s 2001, sold at least six million copies.

Flush with capital to write, produce, and record anything he wanted, Dre announced the Detox project in 2002, referring to it as his “final album.” It was going to be the story of a hit man. Rumor had it that Denzel Washington would narrate.

“I had to come up with something different but still keep it hardcore, so what I decided to do was make my album one story about one person and just do the record through a character’s eyes,” Dre told MTV News in April 2002. “And everybody that appears on my album is going to be a character, so it’s basically going to be a hip-hop musical.”

“I’ve been blueprinting, getting ideas together for the past six months or so, just trying to figure out which direction I want to take and how I’m gonna present the project,” Dre continued. “Just gathering sounds and what have you. I want this one to be really over the top.” He predicted Detox would be released in 2003.

Less than a year later, Dre admitted to giving “the cream of the crop” of his Detox beats to 50 Cent for his album Get Rich or Die Tryin’. It has never actually been confirmed that the beat for what became 50 Cent’s single “In da Club” was intended for Detox, but that cream of the crop beat helped this song go to No. 1 for the rapper. 

 “Dre, he’ll play dope beats…they’re automatic,” 50 said of those sessions. “[He’ll say], ‘These are the hits, 50. So pick one of these and make a couple of singles or something.’”

Having abandoned its original concept, Detox’s release date was pushed back to late 2004. “I’d describe it as the most advanced rap album musically and lyrically we’ll probably ever have a chance to listen to,” co-producer Scott Storch told MTV News. “Dr. Dre always tries to top his last one. That’s why he spends so much time putting [albums] together and they don’t come out every five minutes. He puts a lot of time, energy and genius into the stuff.”

Dre told XXL that the album would have 12 or 13 singles. So I’m really taking my time with each one. No album fillers or nothing like that. No fast-forwarding.” But by May 2004 he’d changed his mind, telling the same publication that he wanted to concentrate on his Aftermath artists. (Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, released in 2000, sold in excess of 10 million copies.)

Years passed. Collaborators hinted at an unreleased masterpiece in other magazine interviews. “I’m thinking of making the album like a movie,” producer Imsomie “Mahogany” Leeper said, “like having 16-bar jazz pieces, live instruments.”

“I was really hoping to have it out this year, but it’s going to have to be pushed back a while because of some other things I’ve got to work on,” Dre told the L.A. Times in 2007. The following year, Snoop Dogg confirmed Detox was finished. “That record is real, it’s coming,” Dogg told Rolling Stone. “I was starting to doubt it myself and then I went up in there and he played so much music for me it knocked my head off.”

The first official release of anything from Detox came during a 2009 Dr. Pepper commercial. “For me,” Dre says, “slow always produces a hit.” He then shows a flailing young DJ how to slow a record down by putting a soda can on the turntable.

By then, Detox’s release date was scheduled for that year And indeed, singles purportedly part of the mix for Detox’s track listing dropped  — “Under Pressure,” “Kush,” and “I Need a Doctor.” The last single went double platinum. The album, however, did not come out.

More Detox songs were leaked in 2011 — “Mr. Prescription,” Chillin’,” and “Die Hard.” In a long-ranging interview with The Fader that year, Dre announced he was ready to take a break from music, mused at how successful his Beats by Dr. Dre line of headphones were, and said nothing about Detox. In 2015, he confirmed that the project was dead.

“Over the years Detox has become the most long-awaited album in hip-hop history, a project that has taken on mythical proportions, and with good reason,” Nathan Slavik wrote for DJBooth. “In addition to launching several of the biggest rappers of the last two decades — Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar — Dre’s first two headlining albums, The Chronic and 2001, were classics. It was completely reasonable to be excited about Detox until it was completely insane to think it would ever drop.”

In 2015, Dre released the soundtrack for Straight Outta Compton, a collection of tracks by N.W.A. and its former members. He also released Compton, his third solo effort, and first in 16 years.

But the story wasn’t actually over. When asked by reporter Chris Haynes in 2018 if Detox was permanently shelved, Dre replied, “I’m working on a couple songs right now. We’ll see.” As if on cue, more musical snippets from the project leaked in May of that year.

The best way I’ve found to think about Detox is that it was a catch-all name for, essentially, most everything Dr. Dre was working on for 15 years. Even noted perfectionists like Dre release material. Instead, as Detox became more mythic in the hip-hop community, it served, whether Dre intended to or not, as a useful publicity tease even as the hype proved impossible to live up to. Between 2009 and 2011, the best of the hundreds of song snippets he worked on were released. In such a rapidly changing musical universe, nothing recorded for Detox, no matter how inspired, was going to remain stylistically relevant over more than a dozen years.

It’s also possible that Dre buckled under the weight of expectation. “I worked on Detox,” DJ Quik told DJBooth. “Just, in theory, Detox is a super smart-ass piece of music, but it’s all music, you know what I mean? That’s what could be the stumbling block for the record. Because it’s all music, and you got so many people to please. If you’re off with one, it won’t be a classic record. So, I understand Dre’s concerns about putting it out. But, some of the tracks I heard, oh my God, get the fuck out of here… Sound-wise, it was gonna be better than Chronic and 2001, and idea-wise.”

“By all accounts — and believe me, I heard every account there was — it seemed like the album had become any creative person’s nightmare,” Slavik wrote.

Given an unlimited budget and no deadline, could you spend the rest of your life locked in a perfectionist’s jail, constantly terrified that the music you’ll make next will be better than the music you’ve made so far, each passing day only becoming further justification to take your time, the pressure of expectation becoming suffocating until one day you realize decades have gone by and you’re even farther away from the finish line than when you started? You seemingly could, and Dr. Dre was living proof. 

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Matt Giles

“People are dying waiting”

TORRENCE, CA - DECEMBER 29: Hospital doctors and nurses treat Covid-19 patients in a makeshift ICU wing on the West Oeste at Harbor UCLA Medical Center on Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2020 in Torrence, CA. The hospital has no open beds for incoming patients and have worked tirelessly to create additional beds for the influx of Covid-19 patients. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

At ProPublica, reporters David Armstrong and Marshall Allen tell the story of 53-year-old Miguel Fernandez, a Latino man from California who contracted the virus last fall. The center of a tight-knit, multigenerational family, Miguel fought for his life in hospital as his loved ones pushed to get him life-saving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation treatment — a specialized therapy that doctors are now in the horrific position of having to reserve for younger patients with the best chance of surviving, as critically ill COVID-19 patients overwhelm a healthcare system stretched far beyond usual limits.

But starting in early November, the daily number of COVID-19 hospitalizations surged in Los Angeles County, rising eightfold between then and the wave’s crest, which arrived just after New Year’s Day. Within weeks, overflowing hospitals faced exactly the types of care-rationing decisions experts had feared. Hospitals set up tents to increase capacity, and ambulances circled for hours as they waited for beds to open. By early January, Los Angeles County emergency medical personnel were directed to conserve supplemental oxygen by only administering it to the neediest patients, and to stop transporting to hospitals cardiac arrest patients who couldn’t be revived in the field. State officials dispatched refrigerated trucks and thousands of body bags to the region.

Miguel didn’t want to go to the hospital. He knew people like him were dying. Latino Angelenos have suffered the highest COVID-19 death rate in Los Angeles County — almost twice the rate of Blacks and about three times the rate for whites.

The separation was especially difficult for Alejandrina, who had been married to Miguel since 1991. Miguel liked to tease her when she watched her Mexican telenovelas: Why do you watch those shows when you have me? On Mother’s Day earlier in the year, Miguel had surprised her by buying a pair of rings, getting down on one knee and proposing again. The couple made plans to renew their vows on their 30th wedding anniversary this summer. When he became sick with COVID-19, Miguel assured Alejandrina he would get better so they could get married again. She promised she would wait for him.

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Binders Full of Men

Jennifer Berney | The Other Mothers: Two Women’s Journey to Find the Family That Was Always Theirs | Sourcebooks | February 2021 | 18 minutes (4,976 words)

 

Becoming Family,” Jennifer’s 2019 essay exploring traditional notions of heredity and paternity, is a nice companion to this piece.

A manila envelope from the country’s largest sperm bank arrived in my mailbox only three days after I had called to request it. I tucked it under my arm and looked around me before returning to my front porch, as if one of my neighbors might catch me—as if there were something forbidden inside. I sat on the step and ran my finger through the envelope seam to unstick the glue. California Cryobank, the catalog said at the top, in white letters on a royal blue background. My wife Kellie and I had already spent months trying to line up a community donor, but no one had come through with a yes. In contrast, this thing in my hands had come to me so easily. I had asked for it and, with the snap of a finger, there it was. Below the company’s name, there was a photograph. I’m not sure what I had expected—maybe a classic image of a baby growing in utero, maybe a mother looking into the eyes of her newborn child. But this photo featured two teenage boys wearing backpacks and smiling at the camera. They stood beneath a tree. It looked like an image I’d expect to see on a college brochure.

Kellie pulled into the driveway with her window rolled down. “Hey, lady,” she said and stepped out of her truck.

“Hey,” I said. My heart sped. I wanted to show her the catalog, but I didn’t want to overwhelm her. I tried to hide my grin.

Kellie sat down next to me. “What’s that?”

I handed it to her. “It’s from that sperm bank in California,” I said. “I called them.”

Kellie didn’t open it. She just held it in her lap.

I reached over and laid a finger on one of the faces on the cover. “Who is this supposed to be?” I asked her. “Are these the babies, all grown up?”

Kellie cocked her head and looked at me to make sure I was serious. “They’re the donors,” she said.

Shit. She was right. My excitement for the packet fizzled. These boys weren’t what I had in mind. Whoever designed the cover must have hoped to convey that these were young men at the peak of their health, but all it highlighted for me was that many of these donors were too young to be making decisions of permanent consequence. They looked like boys, not men. Staring at the picture made me think of factory farming, of dairy cows hooked to milking machines, of chickens dropping eggs in chutes. Were these boys ready to commit to a lifetime of knowing there were children out there that they had helped create? I suspected that most of them just wanted the money for textbooks or beer.

Kellie lifted herself from the step to go inside. I propped the catalog on my knees. Moisture from my skin condensed on the back cover. I flipped through the pages aimlessly, my hope dim.

* * *

My position on sperm—my insistence that a sperm bank was our best and easiest option—was in part based on an assumption I had held since childhood when I first learned of the existence of assisted reproduction. I assumed that the fertility industry wanted to help me, that sperm banks had been designed with lesbians in mind.

I understood that straight couples and single women used sperm banks too, but I had always figured that lesbian couples would make a large share of their clientele, that sperm banks would welcome us, and that our needs would be built into the design of their operation.

I was wrong about this. Sperm banks were not designed for lesbians.

California Cryobank, one of the first commercial sperm banks, opened in 1977 with a very specific purpose: to offer men a way to store their own sperm for future use. This meant that, for instance, a man undergoing treatment for cancer could store vials of semen before starting chemo and radiation, and in doing so could hang on to the option of fathering children someday. Sperm storage was originally envisioned as a niche market for men, available mainly as a safeguard against future infertility. Male sterility, the founders believed, had the potential to be psychologically “shattering”—devastating to a man’s ego.

Few were talking about male infertility as a widespread phenomenon. “Barren” was—and still is—a term applied only to women. Male infertility was seen as so profoundly emasculating that doctors barely mentioned it, even to each other. In the era predating the commercial sperm bank, if a couple had no luck conceiving a child, and if the microscope revealed that the husband’s lack of sperm was at fault, doctors simply recruited one of their male students or staff to donate fresh semen. Sometimes the doctor himself was the secret donor. The arrangement was casual. In many cases, there was no documentation or paperwork. No STD testing. No legal safeguards. No washing, freezing, or quarantining. Just sperm from a source that would always be anonymous to the couple that received it. The prevailing attitude was: Just fix the problem. The less said the better. This approach allowed the husband and wife to carry on as if they’d conceived the child unassisted. Many couples never spoke of the procedure again and never told their children.

It’s worth noting that both this hushed approach to donor insemination and the vision of preemptive sperm banking centered the male experience and ego. It took some time for established sperm banks to identify and fill what now seems like an obvious role: to provide a menu of options to straight couples in need of donor sperm. It took even longer for physicians to cede control and retire the practice of recruiting their own donors.

Commercial sperm banks adapted to help propagate more traditional families—to replace one man’s nonviable semen with another man’s viable semen, and in doing so, fulfill the promise of the normal: a husband, a wife, and children—the American nuclear family.

I assumed that the fertility industry wanted to help me, that sperm banks had been designed with lesbians in mind.

As I was coming of age as a lesbian and considering my future, it had never once occurred to me that the medical industry could legally withhold services from me or anyone else, that they could say yes to straight couples and no to queers, but in fact they did just that. Most sperm banks and fertility clinics turned away any woman who wasn’t conventionally married. Sperm banks weren’t made for lesbians.

It turns out lesbians didn’t need them. Instead, while sperm banks were growing, lesbians were developing networks to support each other. The idea that lesbians could become parents on their own terms was, at the time, revolutionary and connected to the larger feminist goal of giving women full control over their reproductive health. Lesbians and allies organized groups for queer women who wanted to become parents, either as partners or single mothers. They passed out instructions on how to perform inseminations with turkey basters, diaphragms, and needleless syringes. They found clever ways to source sperm.

One way completely avoided any doctor’s office. Several mothers of now-grown children have explained to me how it worked in Seattle in the 1980s.

If you were a lesbian who wanted to get pregnant by an anonymous donor, you needed to find yourself a go-between, a friend who would make things happen for you. The go-between would ask around and find a donor—often a gay man in the larger community. The donor could be a close friend, or a friend of a friend, or a colleague from work. The go-between would know him, but he would be anonymous to the recipient.

In these networks, there was paperwork involved: a survey that asked for basic medical and personal history, not unlike the donor files available to sperm bank clients. The go-between collected this and shared it with the recipients. She kept a separate file with personal information—the donor’s name, his social security number, the recipients he’d been paired with. In theory, this could be shared with the recipient family when the child turned sixteen, and the family could decide if they wanted to track down the donor and contact him. In practice, this exchange didn’t always happen quite like that. Through the course of the interviews I conducted, I heard anecdotes about forms being lost due to illness, death, and human error. However, community and memory are living things, and in some cases those who wanted to find their donors could do so by simply asking around.

Hopeful recipients charted their cycles with the same tools I used to chart mine: a basal thermometer, a chart, and a pen. When it was time to inseminate, the go-between was the emissary. She picked up the ejaculate (two women mentioned artichoke jars as the container of choice) and kept it warm as she transported it to the home of the woman who was trying to conceive. At that point the go-between helped, or bore witness, or got out of the way, but her role wasn’t just functional—it was spiritual. Her presence conveyed the blessing of the larger community.

Someone who was a go-between once would likely be a go-between multiple times. She would have a list of men who were ready and willing and who already knew the drill.

As I learned about these networks one generation later, I was amazed by their efficiency and by how many problems they solved. The network system outsourced the difficult legwork of finding a donor to the go-between, a person who, because she lacked direct personal investment, could more comfortably manage those negotiations. If Kellie and I had employed this approach, it would have spared us some pain. We had just spent two months waiting for an acquaintance to decide whether or not he’d be our donor, and he had ultimately ghosted us. If, say, our friend Dee had been our go-between, then the acquaintance could have delivered his no to Dee without feeling the pressure of our hopes. We wouldn’t have been hurt by his no, because we wouldn’t have even known about it. Instead, we would have simply sent our friend on a mission, and we would have heard back from her once she was successful.

What’s more, the network system preserved anonymity while allowing the would-be parents to rest easy knowing the sperm wasn’t coming from an unknown stranger but a community member who had ties to mutual friends. This system was free and spared recipients from having to medicalize the practice of babymaking.

They passed out instructions on how to perform inseminations with turkey basters, diaphragms, and needleless syringes.

Others have told me stories that capture another mode of conception that was common to lesbians in the ’80s: insemination via feminist health center. These centers—connected to the larger women’s health movement—were established and run by women who sought to empower their peers. This was the generation of feminists who got together in groups and learned how to view their cervixes using a speculum, a flashlight, and a mirror.

Olympia, where Kellie and I lived, had one of these centers, founded by a woman whose name is still legendary among locals: Pat Shively. Pat was a lesbian herself and a mother of three children from an early marriage. (It’s worth noting that heterosexual sex—often the byproduct of a youth spent in the closet—is the oldest form of conception available to lesbians.) When Pat opened the Women’s Health Clinic in 1981, she didn’t do so with the vision of helping fellow queers conceive but with the broader mission of serving diverse populations of women. Her clinic offered abortions, and she made herself available at any hour of the day or night to administer rape kits to women who had been sexually assaulted. I imagine that it must have been a small comfort to those women, in a moment where small comforts mattered, to be seen by someone who was capable of hearing and believing them, by someone who knew how to be tender and also how to fight.

Pat’s role as the local abortion provider made her vulnerable to death threats, and she took to carrying a Glock and wearing a bulletproof vest. In the photos I’ve seen of Pat, she has a small frame, short unkempt curls, and she is always actively holding something: a phone, a pen, a small child’s hand.

So, while Pat Shively may not have set out to make a clinic for the explicit purpose of helping lesbians conceive—while it may not have even been part of her original vision—it’s not hard to see how she wound up filling this niche.

Pat’s inseminations were in some ways similar to the informal inseminations that took place in doctors’ offices behind closed doors before the era of sperm banks. But Pat Shively didn’t have a range of male residents to recruit from. Instead, she looked for college-age men who didn’t smoke pot (studies showed that marijuana use interfered with sperm motility) and paid her donors $30 per specimen. By some accounts, she charged her clients $50 for the inseminations. By other accounts, she did it for free. Either way, it’s clear that she wasn’t getting rich on the practice.

In this arrangement, Pat acted as both medical professional and community member, a variation on the go-between. She taught her clients how to chart their ovulation and timed the inseminations accordingly. Since hers was a small-scale operation, her donor sperm was fresh, not frozen, and she often performed the insemination on the recipient’s sofa.

In both of these systems—network-facilitated insemination and women’s clinic insemination—family-making became a community act not limited to a bedroom or a clinic. Instead, they combined, to varying degrees, personal and clinical elements: the living room couch as the site of insemination, the needleless syringe as the conduit, the friend or partner as the inseminator, the documents that may someday be lost. Both methods centered the humanity of the recipient and allowed her to feel she was the agent rather than the patient.

And, in both of these scenarios, sperm was mainly a means to an end. Between the go-betweens and the recipients, between the clinician and her clients, there was sometimes discussion about what health issues they wanted to avoid or what aspects of someone’s ethnic or religious background they might prefer their donor mirror. Parents-to-be often sought donors who shared their religious or ethnic heritage. But in general no one had the leeway to insist on blue eyes, or a certain height, or an engineering degree, and it seems that no one obsessed over these details. The attitude that drove these systems was that DNA mattered a little, but not a lot. For the most part, women wanted to make a baby, and they wanted sperm from a donor who was reasonably healthy. That was all.

And, in both of these scenarios, sperm was mainly a means to an end.

Contrast this approach with that of the typical sperm bank customer in our current climate. Today’s commercial sperm banks exclude potential donors not just for issues like low sperm count or heritable diseases, but also for height (donors that are five foot eleven and over are strongly preferred, and many banks won’t accept donors who are under five-nine) and weight. Gay men, who were so essential to the lesbian insemination networks of the 1980s, are to this day effectively banned from donating at all commercial sperm banks—a policy that is ostensibly to protect recipients from an increased risk of HIV, but makes little sense when one considers that all donors are tested and retested over a six month period while their sperm is quarantined and that there are no bans on other high-risk sexual behaviors. Straight men can engage in unprotected anal and vaginal sex with multiple female partners and still qualify as donors, while gay men—even those in long-term monogamous relationships—need not even apply.

Most banks actively recruit on college campuses and require their donors to prove that they have earned, or are in the process of earning, a degree from a four-year college, and some banks charge an extra premium for sperm from donors with an advanced or Ivy League degree.

Sociologist Amy Agigian points out that clients are the ones demanding this approach, citing a study where women “placed the highest value on the sperm donor’s education, ethnicity and height.” Agigian goes on to point out that any belief that a donor’s college education is somehow “transmissible through a man’s semen is further evidence of magical thinking about semen that abounds in our culture.”

To put it another way, sperm banks aren’t simply optimizing their samples for the potential child’s future health. They are optimizing to meet demands for children who will conform to societal norms around race and attractiveness. What’s more, they are selling a myth that an advanced degree confers heritable traits, that the Ivy League can be encoded into a child’s DNA.

Lesbians are now among the consumers driving these demands, and yet I can’t help but think back to the early days of lesbian low-tech inseminations and how, for the most part, they were driven not by eugenic ideologies but by personal connections. When it came to alternative insemination, lesbian recipients weren’t focused on making genius babies or maximizing genetics. They simply wanted families, reached out for community support, and received it.

I didn’t know any of this as I sat on my front porch, holding the Cryobank brochure. I didn’t know it, but for the first time, I sensed that Kellie wasn’t wrong—that buying sperm was complicated, that it was fraught with ethical dilemmas, and that the story behind the sperm we were getting was actually a story that mattered.

* * *

That night, as Kellie slept, I went online. When I Googled “sperm bank,” California Cryobank topped the list, and the rest of the first page was filled with companies that looked nearly identical to the brochure I’d already viewed. Their web pages featured chubby, smiling babies, welcomed by straight couples who looked more like J. Crew models than actual families.

I tried variations. “Sperm bank small” and “sperm bank gay friendly.” I didn’t get anywhere. With each search, the same corporations showed up. It was just before midnight when I finally added the word lesbian to my search and, bingo, the top result linked to a website that featured a woman, alone, holding a baby. She wore a hooded sweatshirt and a loose ponytail; she looked less like a J. Crew model and more like a person I might actually know in real life. Just above the picture was the tagline: “A trusted resource for women planning alternative families.”

Pacific Reproductive Services, it turned out, was a lesbian-centered cryobank founded by Sherron Mills in 1984. Mills, like Pat Shively in Olympia, had been helping lesbians get pregnant out of a community-run clinic. But as demand for inseminations grew, and as the AIDS crisis swelled, Mills wanted an actual donor insemination program that would meet FDA standards—no more fresh ejaculate on demand from a couple of handy donors.

The issue with mainstream sperm banks, as Sherron Mills saw it, wasn’t just that they refused to serve lesbians. Mills also believed that lesbians deserved medical care tailored to their specific needs. In a world where the medical model so often assumed heterosexuality, lesbians deserved a place where they could be at the center of the practice, not floating on the periphery.

Over twenty years later, I hadn’t known I would need this. I had expected, always, that so long as I lived in a progressive community, I’d be effortlessly folded into the larger system. But here I was, already longing for inclusion, seeking a place that had been designed with me in mind.

In a world where the medical model so often assumed heterosexuality, lesbians deserved a place where they could be at the center of the practice, not floating on the periphery.

As I clicked through the site, I learned that PRS was a comparably small operation and that, besides their alternative demographic, they distinguished themselves from larger commercial sperm banks by offering a catalog of what they called “willing to be known” donors.

“Willing to be known” didn’t mean what Kellie would have wanted it to mean. We couldn’t take these guys out for coffee and interview them about their life histories and their politics. We couldn’t even learn their names. But they did come with a promise—an unenforceable promise—that when our future child turned eighteen, they could access their donor’s name and contact information. It struck me as uncomfortable—a little scary even—that my child upon turning eighteen could make a call and add a stranger to our family. But in other ways it seemed preferable to a closed-door policy, our baby’s DNA a mystery that could never be unlocked. My personal stance on secrets was this: I only liked the ones that included me.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the “willing to be known” program was a variation on the Identity Release Program, which was developed and trademarked by the Sperm Bank of California in 1983. Today, in the era of DNA testing, all major sperm banks offer a similar open identity option, and many argue that it’s unethical to offer donors the anonymous option, since it is likely that any donor can now be tracked down, with or without their consent.

PRS was based in San Francisco where, coincidentally, I would be traveling soon. In just a few weeks, my mother would be attending a work conference there, and I planned to join her to visit a city I’d never seen before and eat good food, walk through neighborhoods, and shop for books.

Oh, and visit a sperm bank. Is that something people actually do? I wondered. I recognized the feeling of getting swept up in my own excitement and leaving my level head behind. I tried to talk myself down. There was no reason to make sperm the focus of the trip. Before this moment, I had been looking forward to San Francisco as a distraction from all of this. As I climbed into bed and spooned against Kellie, I could hear my own pulse where my ear pressed against the pillow. People typically ordered sperm online, I told myself, trying to settle my brain towards sleep. There was no real reason for an in-person visit. Certainly I shouldn’t let it become the focus of my trip. Maybe I wouldn’t even visit it while I was in town.

* * *

“I’m thinking of visiting a sperm bank while we’re here.” I said this within ten minutes of greeting my mother in the hotel lobby. Within an hour, we were searching for the address on a map. She wanted to come too. Her eagerness fed my own.

My mother, when traveling, resembled Big Bird; already tall, she seemed to gain another two inches and hover above any crowd we moved through, taking in the sights with a kind of transparent awe. Like Big Bird, my mother was trusting and curious, and would start conversations with anyone we came into contact with. By this, I don’t just mean that she made small talk with the hotel clerk or the cab driver, although she did. But I mean that she also sought chances to chat with the family standing outside the native plant exhibit and the couple seated at the neighboring table.

The sperm bank was less than two miles from the hotel where my mother and I stayed. Together, we walked through a neighborhood of restaurants and bookstores, and then took a left down a hill and descended into a district that was gray and industrial. I kept my eyes fixed on the numbers, and stopped when I spotted the address, 444 De Haro Street, outside a monstrous building built of concrete, glass, and steel. It was a Friday afternoon, and there was no one in sight, though the corridor was vast, with high ceilings and potted palm trees. I felt like an interloper in the corporate world, snooping around with my mother, looking for sperm. I was afraid that a roaming security guard might stop us and ask what we were doing.

But eventually I found it, up one flight of stairs and tucked around the corner. Inside Suite 222, the decor changed dramatically, from bank lobby to massage therapist’s office. The hall smelled of essential oils, of lavender and eucalyptus. A long-haired receptionist sat just beyond the entrance and greeted us. In an effort to keep my mom from talking first, I introduced us right away. “I called last week about visiting,” I explained. “I’ve been trying to settle on a sperm bank, and I just figured since I’m in town—”

“Of course,” she said, nodding. “You might want to spend some time in there,” she suggested, indicating a private room that featured houseplants, a round table, and two wicker chairs with floral-print cushions. “That’s where we keep the donor profiles.” She explained that there were two special binders that held childhood photographs of every willing-to-be-known donor. Each photograph had a number that corresponded to a profile in a separate binder. “Settle in, take as long as you want, and let me know if you have any questions.”

I reached for one of the photo binders first, and my mother took the other. They were wide three-ring binders stuffed with crisp sheets of plastic that shined beneath the light. Each page held two photos, one above the other. On blank sticker labels, someone had handwritten each donor’s number. Some of the photos featured newborn babies, red-faced and swaddled in blankets. Those weren’t so helpful. Others were school-issued photos from first or second grade. They had big smiles with missing teeth, or corduroy jackets, or Afros.

My mother and I sat side by side, studious. Each time one of us turned a page, there was the soft sound of plastic unsticking. Occasionally my mother would chuckle and tap my arm. I’d crane my neck to view her binder. Her choices were different than mine: boys with tidy hair, bow ties, and sparkling teeth. I liked the boys with the shaggy hair and awkward smiles.

What struck me about the binders was this: throughout my twenties I’d been paying attention to my feelings about individual children. Though I liked children in general, and though I was sure that I wanted to have my own, there were plenty of kids whom I could take or leave. They were the boys with buzz cuts and truck T-shirts who begged for toy guns at Target or the girls in faux-fur coats belting out pop songs I barely recognized. Certainly these children were adorable to someone, but they sparked nothing for me. There were plenty of adults I had no interest in or didn’t connect with. Why should kids be any different?

Then there were the kids I wanted to take home with me, the girl with long brown hair and freckles who leaned off the side of her father’s shopping cart. Or the boy with the wide eyes and gap between his teeth who drew pictures while waiting for his food to arrive in the restaurant. After recognizing one of these kids, I always told myself: my kid will be one of the loveable ones. As I looked through the binder of photographs, I had an instantaneous reaction to each one. Some of the photos didn’t interest me at all, but others tugged at my heart. It may have all been an illusion—a crooked bow tie or a Snoopy shirt may have signaled to me, erroneously, that this child felt like kin. The photographs in all likelihood could not predict how I would have felt about the donor as a grown man. But even if my intuitions were illusions, I appreciated them. The photos gave me a sense of control, a sense that I was choosing a person rather than a number.

I felt like an interloper in the corporate world, snooping around with my mother, looking for sperm.

My mother lost interest in the photographs eventually and let herself out of the room. As I pored over donor questionnaires that matched some of my favorite photos, I could hear her chatting with the receptionist, explaining that I had a partner, Kellie, who lived with me in Olympia. “You must get quite a few lesbian couples here,” she said. When she began offering the details of our lives, I hurried to join my mother at the desk.

As I approached, my mother put her arm around my waist. “I was telling her about your situation,” she said. I felt my cheeks grow hot.

The receptionist laid her hands on her desk, as if she had no other tasks to attend to. “Do you have any questions I can answer?” she asked me.

I had just one. I wondered where their donors came from. “Are they all in college?” I asked.

“We get some college students,” she said. “But, actually, we advertise on Craigslist. That’s how most of our donors come to us.”

I let out a laugh. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this information, that the sperm at this clinic came from the place I associated with free couches and unwanted cats. It seemed that I could have chosen to be troubled by this. But, more than anything, I liked it. I liked the idea the donors were invited rather than recruited, that the call for them went out to the community at large.

“We get a better range of donors that way,” she explained. She was right—from the profiles I’d looked at, most of them listed actual professions rather than majors; I’d seen a doctor, a fireman, an electrical engineer.

That night, in the hotel room, my mother and I each sat on our own bed, each with a bedside lamp on, reading. As she read the book she brought, I spread open the folder that the receptionist had sent me home with. The files didn’t contain much information that was new to me. There was a FAQ page, a handout on how to chart your cycles, and some specifics on shipping and ordering, but I read every word carefully as if I were studying blueprints for a home I would soon build. 

This chapter has been adapted for publication on Longreads.

* * *

Jennifer Berney writes to explore the human state of longing. Her essays have appeared in Tin House, The Offing, Brevity, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications. You can find her on Twitter at @JennBerney.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Tragedy on the Pacific Crest Trail

CAMPO, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 24: A monument marking the Southern Terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail sits along the U.S.-Mexico border on January 24, 2019 near Campo, California. The trail is a 2,650 mile trek from Mexico to Canada. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Since 2012, the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail has seen an influx of hopefuls making their own attempt at the arduous and challenging distance, made famous in part by the book Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s account of her crossing, and the movie of the same name starring Reese Witherspoon.

The trail, which starts at the northern border of Mexico and ends at the southern Canadian border, traverses California, Oregon, and Washington. It features every type of landscape and all the permutations of precipitation west coast weather has to offer.

In March 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a stay-at-home order to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The “Pacific Crest Trail Association asked long-distance hikers to leave the trail, lest they carry the coronavirus to small towns ill-equipped to cope.” As Louise Farr reports at Alta, Hiker Trevor Laher’s father Doug begged him to leave the trail and come home. The government order and the pleas were not enough. Trevor continued on, at his peril, not falling victim to the virus but the perilous conditions of the San Jacinto Mountains.

Trevor often assured Karen that only 11 PCT hikers had died along the trail since it had been officially declared finished in 1993, but exact figures are difficult to pin down. The number could be as high as 20. At least 5 hikers have disappeared and not been found. In fact, there have been 11 deaths on or near the trail in California, 8 of those in the desert section.

Dave and Marilyn drove on a parallel road for a mile, watching Trevor appear and disappear between bushes. They honked the car horn and waved, and he clicked his hiking poles, grinning in acknowledgment. “That was the last time we talked to him or saw him,” says Marilyn. Then the world changed.

“The sun came out, the wind died almost completely, and it was perfect blue skies,” Cody recalls. “There was a very light snow on everything, maybe a quarter of an inch. It was quite a beautiful morning. But that also, I think, lulled us into a false sense of security.”

For the briefest time, he managed to stay in place. Then, suddenly, he began sliding feet first, gathering momentum until he hit a rock and began cartwheeling into an icy gorge.

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Repetitive Stress

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Devin Kelly | Longreads | February, 2021 | 24 minutes (6,376 words)

Read Devin Kelly’s previous Longreads essays: “Running Dysmorphic,” “What I Want to Know of Kindness,” and “Out There: On Not Finishing.”

It wasn’t the pain on the lateral side of my right knee in March. I kept running through that. It wasn’t the throbbing of my right shin in July. I kept running through that. It was one morning, waking up, when I couldn’t bend my right leg at all. If I could’ve run, I would’ve. I just couldn’t. 

I should tell you before I say anything more that I am writing this from a place of injury, not recovery. There will be no conquering here, no overcoming. Nothing will be fixed by this essay’s end. Not long ago, I was diagnosed with an osteochondral lesion in my right knee. This, after multiple office visits and an MRI. This, after a year spent running over two thousand miles. After another year spent running over two thousand miles. After another year spent running over two thousand miles. And so on. And so on. And so on, and on.

An osteochondral lesion is a break in the cartilage that spreads itself over a bone. In this case, the fracture is in the cartilage covering the base of my femur. That cartilage does so much. It is, essentially, like a bone being fractured. The diagnosis is uncertain. I can walk fine. I present well. I do push-ups in the morning instead of going out for my usual run. I pace the apartment like a jaguar. I spend a whole day wishing I was someone else. They say I can’t run for months. They say something about surgery, maybe. They say don’t think about it yet. I stay up in bed and wonder if I will ever be the same. 
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