The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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“I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK/ I sleep all night and I work all day.” This is what was playing in my head, in an incessant loop, as I worked on this reading list. It’s a song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a British comedy show, and includes the line: “Leaping from tree to tree/ As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia.” This is accurate. British Columbia is where I now live, and I have seen for myself the vast swathes of felled logs clogging up rivers around the province — just without the leaping lumberjack (aka Michael Palin). Logging is a huge industry here, a business that comes with its share of controversy — which in turn has inspired some thought-provoking writing.
And it isn’t just logging that writers have chosen as a subject matter — the beauty of trees, their communication, their struggles, and their many mysteries have all been tackled. It’s not hard to see the inspiration. On many a hike, I have stood in awe before a towering tree, tried to wrap my arms around a huge trunk to no avail, or breathed in the heady scents of the distinct species as they drift across a trail. Trees are magnificent, and so it came as no surprise that some of the words written about them are as well.
This essay from Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard is a wonderful way to start our journey into the woods. Simard conjures a forest scene for us with great reference, almost affection. Here she is in among some Canadian trees, researching the fascinating connections that link a forest together. Fungus plays a huge role for Team Tree, linking old trees and young seedlings by delivering nutrients and messages between them. She beautifully describes this underground network: “This courageous root was as vulnerable as a growing bone, and it survived by emitting biochemical signals to the fungal network hidden in the earth’s mineral grains, its long threads joined to the talons of the giant trees.” This interconnected, familial system leads Simard to ponder on her own family — her children, and a failing marriage.
The roots of these little seedlings had been laid down well before I’d plucked them from their foundation. The old trees, rich in living, had shipped the germinants waterborne parcels of carbon and nitrogen, subsidizing the emerging radicals and cotyledons—primordial leaves—with energy and nitrogen and water. The cost of supplying the germinants was imperceptible to the elders because of their wealth—they had plenty. The trees spoke of patience, of the slow but continuous way old and young share and endure and keep on. Just as the steadiness of my girls steadied me, and I told myself I was strong enough to endure this season of separation. Besides, I’d have a sabbatical in a year, and I could make their lunches again, drumsticks and sliced cucumber and oranges cut into smiles, and I could show them how to build go-carts and plant flowers, and Nava and I could read together more, alternating turns through pages of Mercy Watson to the Rescue. But until that magical year, I’d spirit across the mountains each weekend to reabsorb their lives, my motherhood like time-lapse photography.
Others have also been inspired by the intimacy of forest networks, and in this article for Smithsonian, Richard Grant takes a walk into the woods with Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, and author, who has developed a unique way of talking about trees — one that has earned him some scorn among the scientific community. Wohleben takes anthropomorphism to a new level, discussing mother trees who “feed their saplings … and warn the neighbors of danger,” compared to fickle young trees who take “foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light chasing, and excessive drinking.”
While trees may not have “will or intention,” it can still be argued that they are more social and sophisticated than people once thought. This is what Wohleben wants his audience to realize, and it seems his imaginative descriptions deliberately slip into the world of fairytales. People love a story, and this wordsmith uses his narrative skill to engage people with the forests he adores. In the slow-moving world of trees, adding a little drama to the “Crown princes” who “wait for the old monarchs to fall” is a clever tactic, and Wohleben does not seem too phased by the criticism: “they call me a ‘tree-hugger,’ which is not true. I don’t believe that trees respond to hugs.” A dive into Wohlleben’s world certainly isn’t boring — his language, after all, is rather delightful.
Trees can detect scents through their leaves, which, for Wohlleben, qualifies as a sense of smell. They also have a sense of taste. When elms and pines come under attack by leaf-eating caterpillars, for example, they detect the caterpillar saliva, and release pheromones that attract parasitic wasps. The wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, and the wasp larvae eat the caterpillars from the inside out. “Very unpleasant for the caterpillars,” says Wohlleben. “Very clever of the trees.”
A recent study from Leipzig University and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research shows that trees know the taste of deer saliva. “When a deer is biting a branch, the tree brings defending chemicals to make the leaves taste bad,” he says. “When a human breaks the branch with his hands, the tree knows the difference, and brings in substances to heal the wound.”
Our boots crunch on through the glittering snow. From time to time, I think of objections to Wohlleben’s anthropomorphic metaphors, but more often I sense my ignorance and blindness falling away. I had never really looked at trees before, or thought about life from their perspective. I had taken trees for granted, in a way that would never be possible again.
In this essay for Emergence Magazine, we go on another forest walk, this time alongside Tristan McConnell, who is documenting a “stubbly, hollow-cheeked sixty-four-year-old” named Joseph Mbaya. Walking in the mountain forests that surround Mount Kenya, Mbaya finds a portal to a “slower and more meaningful world,” and also treatments for ear infections and “pungent wind.” His knowledge of herbal cures makes walking the forest tracks with Mbaya, “like walking the aisles of CVS with a taciturn pharmacist.”
It is lovely to share an insight into the mystical remedies a forest can offer, but this essay quickly takes a darker turn, detailing how these magical forests are shrinking. Fire-clearing for farming, timber plantations, and climate change are all taking their toll — but so is simply the poverty of this region. For many here, “conservation is an unaffordable luxury” — with the forest offering a resource they need to exploit, rather than protect, in order to survive.
DEEP INSIDE THE fractured forests that still ring the mountain, a hallowed sense of wonder persists. One morning, soon after the sun burns mist from the mountainsides and clouds shroud the peaks, I visit part of the mountain’s few remaining areas of old-growth woodland with a pair of young Kenyan foresters from the Mount Kenya Trust. Marania Forest, on the mountain’s northern fringe, is a revelation: thickly towering trunks of eight-hundred-year-old rosewood reach overhead, the trees’ crowns held up to the light of the canopy, pencil-straight cedar and craggy-barked olive are draped with lichen, and moss carpets the earth, muffling sound to a church-like silence. It is dark, crowded, and otherworldly—the ground soft underfoot, the trunks damp to the touch, the trees centuries old, the sunlight breaking through in narrow shafts. At our feet, fallen trunks breach the understory like shipwrecks, gradually decaying and returning to the soil—to its subterranean fungal networks and the spreading roots of neighboring trees—as food for the rest of the forest. We all smile, the foresters and I. It is a routine venture out for them, and my first to these old forests, and yet our reactions are the same: joy and reverential wonder. We instinctively drop our voices to a whisper. We walk and talk, feet sinking into the damp, spongey soil as the foresters teach me about the trees.
The forests around Mount Kenya are not unique — forest exploitation is a controversial issue around the world. Within my own community in British Columbia, the debate has recently been focused around the logging of old-growth trees in an area called Fairy Creek. For many months now, protesters have been blocking access to the logging cut block — and more than 300 people have been arrested, making it one of the largest civil disobedience actions in recent Canadian history.
A few pieces have been written about Fairy Creek, but I was particularly struck by the insight Sarah Cox provided in her article for The Narwhal. Cox not only looks at the perspective of the protestors and the police, but at the viewpoint of the people on whose territory Fairy Creek lies — the Pacheedaht First Nation. It’s complicated. The Pacheedaht co-manages the annual cut on its territory, and forestry has helped them to provide revenue and jobs — even allowing them to buy back some of their ancestral lands. The Pacheedaht First Nation’s elected leadership has asked the protestors to leave, but an elder, Bill Jones, has welcomed the protestors and garnered extensive media coverage. Cox deftly peels back the layers to look at the tensions within a community that has often been overlooked in this debate.
We scramble onto the boggy shore of an island where four Pacheedaht members in hip waders are planting sedges and grasses to repair damage to fish habitat caused by decades of industrial logging — logging in which the nation played no part and from which it received no benefit. An eagle lets out a high-pitched whistle. Our boots squelch in the mud. Then, slicing through the stillness, comes the throaty chuckachuka-chuckachuka of a RCMP helicopter.
For the Chief, “everything that’s been happening,” refers to the blockades taking place in and around the Fairy Creek watershed on Pacheedaht territory and in the neighbouring territory of the Ditidaht First Nation. From the estuary, we can almost see the green spirals of the Fairy Creek valley, only a few kilometres distant, that has become the epicentre of a flourishing movement to save the last of B.C.’s unprotected old-growth forests. At this very moment, RCMP are arresting protesters wedged into tall tripods hammered together with discarded logs or lying under tarps with their arms chained inside “sleeping dragons” — metal tubes dug into the ground. When the RCMP leave each day, more protesters (or land defenders, tree protectors, tree-huggers or intruders, depending on whom you talk to) drive their cars, camper vans, trucks and SUVs up the inclines of logging roads that provide access to planned logging in the Fairy Creek watershed.
The past few months have brought home to me that logging is not the only threat to our forests — climate change is increasing the impact of fires year on year. This summer the area where I live reached an unprecedented 46 degrees, a whole town burned to the ground, and I witnessed for myself flames licking up a forested mountain, gleefully jumping from tree to tree with ease.
Old-growth forest is more fire-resistant — and in fact, this is one of the arguments for saving old growth from the saws — but as David Ferris points out in his poignant essay for Greenwire, even the very oldest are now being wrecked by blazes. Ferris tells the story of last August, when the CZU Lightning Complex Fire “climbed the ladder of lesser trees and into the crowns of the giants,” ruining redwoods that had formed “an unbroken living line from today’s Silicon Valley to the times of the Bible.” Ferris peppers his stories with these jaw-dropping facts — the trees in question are up to 2,500 years old, 350 feet tall, and have six chromosomes compared to a mere two in us humans — they are simply incredible. He also paints a vivid picture of their home, a “cloud forest, dripping and primeval,” steeped in time. In contrast, the story of the fire is tense and fast, the drama played out through the eyes of Cal Fire’s Dan Bonfante, who almost lost his life.
As the forest burns every year, the humans who live near the redwoods will experience heat waves, and evacuations, and blackouts, and droughts, and mudslides, and smoke hanging in the air. Creatures that don’t measure their lives in millennia could find their life spans nastier and shorter.
The shaggy, patient trees that form an unbroken living line from today’s Silicon Valley to the times of the Bible are in ruins. The sprouts bursting from their trunks suggest that the shaded cathedrals could return, though the healing may take so long that no one now alive will see them. Today’s adults will take their children to Big Basin, and to landscapes across the West where once-verdant forests have been withered by fire. They will point and talk, not of the desolation that is, but of the Eden that used to be — and could be again, one distant day.
“In my lifetime, yeah, it’s not going to look like it used to look,” said Kerbavaz with a shrug. “But in the next lifetime, probably.”

Andrew Kay | Longreads | July 2021 | 35 minutes (9,917) words)
This story was published in partnership with The Point Magazine.
Friday evening
On a July evening in upstate New York, in a field long ago nicknamed “the Bowl,” a dozen men of divergent builds and ages line up in a row. They are wearing street clothes, and they stare — some at the ground, others at the sky — with the studied demureness of people who know they are being watched. Some 10 yards away a huddle of people acting in an official-seeming capacity size them up with laserlike intentness, shielding their mouths as they mutter impressions to one another. And all around them a hundred hushed onlookers have gathered, sharing whispered speculations about the outcome of something plainly momentous.
This is the culmination of casting day for the 2019 Hill Cumorah Pageant, a production put on by Mormons each summer and likely the largest outdoor theater event in America. It’s a spectacle that from the vantage of 2021 seems doubly alien: first because it is among the most bonkers, if least-known, of all pieces of Americana; second because it is an immense gathering of bodies, so my mental pictures of it, when I conjure them amid the pandemic’s late stages, appear like negatives of a vanished world.
The pageant is best described as cosmic cosplay: a volunteer cast of 770 Mormons from across the continent — electricians and nurses and adjunct professors, selected from an applicant pool of thousands — acts out key scenes from the Book of Mormon, the faith’s foundational text, before an international audience. (In 2019 that audience will total 43,000.) It has been happening since 1937, but in late 2018 the Mormon prophet, Russell Nelson, decreed that it must end; the last show, pageant organizers decided, would happen in 2020. Because of COVID-19, though, the finale will get postponed to 2021, and in time that too will be canceled — meaning this, the 2019 pageant, is the actual finale. That no one knows this now gives the events of this week a strange retrospective poignancy.
Since morning they have cast all 770 souls — all but one, that is — assigning parts both major and minor for a mythic drama that sprints through the panicked flight, from Jerusalem, of a party of fugitives in 600 BC, repulsed by that city’s godless decadence; their journey by ship to the Americas; their multiplying in time, then fissuring into two rival tribes; the appearance, hundreds of years later, of the just-resurrected Jesus before them — here, in the Americas, where Mormons believe Jesus walked and preached; the killing-off of the more virtuous tribe by the wickeder one, but not before the good tribe has buried a history of its doings through the centuries, inscribed on gold plates, for posterity; and finally, the unearthing of those plates 1400 years later by a young Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, at the urging of a being named Moroni, on the very hillside (the Hill Cumorah) where the pageant is performed.
All this they will reenact just six days from now, when the pageant’s directors will elevate this ragtag army to theatrical competence. Then, on opening night, in costumes ranging from 19th century Yankee garb to whatever fugitive Israelites living in the pre-Columbian Americas might have worn, they will dramatize these scenes on a 10-level stage overlooking the Bowl. Striding about, they will trace memorized movements and lip-synch dialogue to a soundtrack from the ‘80s featuring an epic, John Williams-esque score. Many will dance, embodying that double helix of the sacred yet campy that Mormons have mastered. And when the show is over, per tradition, they will go forth to meet the crowd, and the actor playing Joseph Smith, a perennial fan favorite — this year, a cherubic grocery-store consultant with an MBA — will get mobbed as if he were Freddie Mercury or Kesha.
All of that, though, is yet to come. Now they must cast Jesus — or rather, the Jesuses, for though there is only one Jesus in Mormonism, he is played in the pageant by two men. The first role, by far the less prominent, is the Jesus who appears early in the show, in a vision to the prophet Lehi in Jerusalem, foretelling his birth centuries later; he is called “Vision Savior.” The second is the Jesus who, at the pageant’s pinnacle, visits the Americas: “New World Multitude Savior.”
The men in the row mill about now, striking sheepish smiles or mumbling quips. Then they take turns stepping forward and pacing back and forth, waving magnanimously and exclaiming, “Bring me your children!” while the directors assess their resemblance to the Son of God. One is a friendly-faced man with auburn hair and a dad bod, perhaps 42; another, 23 or so, has a thick middle-parted mane and looks like a young Eddie Vedder. Still another, about the same age, looks to be a disciple too of CrossFit — and when it is his turn to stride to and fro he teeters backward in his cross trainers, as if burdened by his own pecs. It is unclear whether Jesus can be jacked, but the answer would appear to be no: he and the Vedder look-alike are politely waved away by the directors.
Evening advances, and the sky turns a providential pink. The directors confer, engaging in an act that they understand, by their own account, in miraculous terms. They cast everyone based on spiritual hunches: as Mormons see it, every human is a kind of telegraph that clicks, at intervals, into clarity and articulacy, alive with vibrations from beyond. (Mormons call these intervals “personal revelation.”) They await this clarity together now — and I have the sense, viewing them and the anxious would-be Jesuses, that I am seeing something I am not supposed to see: that the powers that be in Salt Lake City, who know of my trip to the pageant — who have stipulated that I must be accompanied by an escort at all times and have, I keep imagining, reviewed my criminal record and even my browser history — would not want me witnessing this unchoreographed scene.
At last the pageant’s artistic director, a Brigham Young University theater instructor named Shawnda Moss, hastens alone toward the remaining men, dismissing all but two — one the man with the dad bod, the other a slender kid in his early 20s with blond hair and dark eyebrows. The crowd coos. Moss looks up at both and, on the verge of tears, declares, “I would like to cast the two of you as our saviors.” Then she turns to the younger of the two and says, “I would like to cast you as our New World Multitude Savior”; to the middle-aged man: “I would like you to be our Vision Savior.”
Interlude; or, What the Hell Am I Doing Here
All that summer I had been sleepwalking. Mornings I woke, and with a glazed-over slowness, a boredom, slouched through my workaday round. Long after work I slouched down streets, familiar streets, which in darkness came to seem projections of my own neural pathways — a circuitry I was sick of. “I feel like I’ve lost the ability to be surprised,” I told a therapist. I tried edibles — chocolates — and when the first did nothing ate a second, then a third, and then all three arrived at once, a stampede that left me rocking back and forth, repentant, ready to moonlight as a D.A.R.E. speaker.
It wasn’t “depression,” exactly; it was spiritual, a staleness that, as an irreligious person, I’d fought with all my life. Except this time was different: I was glimpsing it all around me — in my students especially, college kids to whom I taught writing. The boy with the 142 IQ who went full Brian Wilson and stopped getting out of bed one day. The girl who confessed to me, in chillingly dispassionate tones, that she saw no point in living out the rest of her days. Something was afoot: some gathering despondency, strongest in the young, that had no shortage of worldly causes — planetary, economic — and yet exceeded these. It was a ghostly deficiency. All the Christian faiths in America were hemorrhaging members — and panicking. Fewer than half of millennials now identified as Christian, while Zoomers had just been declared “the Least Religious Generation.” “Nones” outnumbered Catholics and equaled evangelicals.
Meanwhile, a host of weird pseudo-religions like QAnon had sprung up to fill the void, which terrified me. One morning I drove out to the country and, cresting a summit, saw a giant Q mowed into a hillside.
One day I saw a headline that woke me up: the penultimate Hill Cumorah Pageant was approaching. I knew about the pageant because, though I live in Wisconsin, I grew up half an hour from where it takes place. I’d never attended, but knew that once a year a wormhole materialized down the road, something akin to J.K. Rowling’s Platform 9 ¾ that bore you not to Hogwarts but a parallel universe of mature make-believe. The headline kindled my curiosity. I pictured Mormons — a pair of missionaries clacking their way down the street in those white short-sleeved shirts, black pants, and dress shoes, facsimiles of Gallant from Highlights — and it struck me that they were the antithesis of what afflicted me and those I knew. Something in their door-to-door deportment, their earnestness and brio, seemed a soft rebuke to my own disenchantment.
I would go and walk among them, discover what they were plugged into and even absorb something of their radiance. In the process I would return to where I was from — and where, I should explain, I first knew the jolt of something higher.
I would go and walk among them, discover what they were plugged into and even absorb something of their radiance. In the process I would return to where I was from — and where, I should explain, I first knew the jolt of something higher. I’m an older millennial, one of the legions of “nones”; my upbringing was an experiment in godlessness — secular and scientific, shorn of euphemism. My mom was an ex-flower child, my dad an alumnus of the original Woodstock who made kombucha and jogged on our home treadmill in just tighty-whities and blue Pumas. To teach my brothers and me about origins, they read aloud from that candid seventies picture book, Where Did I Come From? In it were illustrations of a plump, ruddy-cheeked couple with thicket-like pubes who, in one image, were in bed together, locked in a coital embrace. “It’s a little like a sneeze,” the caption read, “but much better.”
What happens when you raise a child in a vacuum of religion, untroubled by sin, bereft of any metaphysical framework? I spent Sundays watching MTV and playing outside; I discovered masturbation at around age 8 (privately dubbing orgasm “the super feeling”), then, convinced anything so delightful must be injurious, renounced it. At night I lay awake, brooding on eternity. The worldview of Where Did I Come From, however clear-sighted, reduced human life to biology alone; there were no sequels entitledWhy Am I Here? or Where Am I Going? What dogged me most was the endlessness of death: an electric shock coursed through my body when I tried to grasp the infinitude of it, how all the eons I could think of were, joined together, the briefest prologue to whatever lay beyond the grave. How was everyone I knew just going about their affairs — talking on the phone, dawdling at the mall — when it was obvious they were hurtling toward that blankness? Shouldn’t they be screaming?
At some point, to divert my brain, I took to reading late into the night. The books were science fiction and fantasy — and because I shared a room with my younger brother who fell asleep easily, I read them by the glow of a Nintendo Game Boy accessory called a Light Boy. I sat up reading, at first, Orson Scott Card’s Ender saga, Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet and the requisite Tolkien novels, then weirder stuff: David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
The books drilled a hole through my world of Saved by the Bell reruns, and through that hole I could peer at a widened reality where good and evil lay as clearly demarcated as oil from water. Supernaturalism abounded: people died and rose again, often many times over. It was possible to believe that the sensible world was a fraction of what was — that a numinous realm hovered behind it where other life forms dwelled, watching and invisibly swaying us.
I now know that nearly all these writers — and with them heavyweights like Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, and C. S. Lewis, plus recent voices like Stephenie Meyer — were, or are, ardent theists. I think I leapt at them because they were smuggling in religion under the guise of science fiction. Or was there a difference? I see myself sitting up in bed like a miner in darkness, equipped with the Light Boy and holding it, lamp-like, over books that together formed a vein of something — some ore of strangeness, of wonder, that I hadn’t known I’d needed but couldn’t now ignore.
Tuesday morning
It was a luminous July morning. I was being driven about the grounds in a golf cart by Neil Pitts, the pageant president, a man of 68 with the benignant and fatherly air of an elementary-school principal, who was indeed wearing a white short-sleeved button-down and black pants. We drove past the 10-level stage, an enormous Chichen Itza-like structure with a steel frame and façade of gray fiberglass sheeting, built into the lower half of the Hill. Pitts explained that the pageant began in the ‘30s, when Mormon missionaries living on the Joseph Smith Family Farm, down the road, put on impromptu skits from the Book of Mormon to amuse themselves. In 1937 it became standard and they moved it to the Hill Cumorah.
I see myself sitting up in bed like a miner in darkness, equipped with the Light Boy and holding it, lamp-like, over books that together formed a vein of something — some ore of strangeness, of wonder, that I hadn’t known I’d needed but couldn’t now ignore.
We entered Zion’s Camp, crammed with RVs and tents, deserted just now. We passed one tent with a huge banner-like photo draped across the front; pictured was a family of eight, arms around one another — good-looking, Rockwellian people who sparkled. Then we cut back across the Bowl, and Pitts described the seismic power of the sound system, complete with speakers below the stage that rumbled during the show’s most action-packed sequence — a scene called “Destruction,” when earthquakes and flooding rock the Americas as Christ is crucified. Though I knew this from my reading, I turned to Pitts and, with the artless fascination of a child, said, “So the consequences of the Crucifixion were felt here?” He nodded: “Big-time.”
We passed a pavilion called the Study Shelter, where meals and hymns happened, then skirted the cast area, full of tents where youths hung out when not rehearsing. At last we made our way back to the stage, where some 200 cast members had gathered for morning rehearsal. Pitts dished me off to my next chaperone, associate director Shelby Gist, a straight-talking woman in a streaming floral blouse and jorts. Gist stood at the center of a throng of players, telling them with the exasperation of a JV hoops coach when to depart the stage after a scene: “The exact line is, ‘Then he will pour out his spirit abundantly upon you.’ Then you can move!”
The cast dispersed to their stations about the stage. Many were clad in BYU merch, others in a popular T-shirt that read AIR MORMON, featuring a silhouette spread-eagled in space — but instead of Michael Jordan dunking it was an angel blowing into an apocalyptic trumpet. They ran through a “boat scene” depicting the fugitives’ voyage from Jerusalem to the Americas, in which they reared up a mast nested in the stage while spray geysered up. As the brassy space-opera soundtrack blared, I watched an attempted mutiny as Nephi — the Book of Mormon’s extremely sincere protagonist, its Frodo — got ambushed, only to shriek, “Touch me not!” in tones that would’ve made Elijah Wood blush; and, magically, the mutineers flew backward and collapsed.
I started laughing at this, adult live action role-playing that it was, yet found it captivating: it was the strangest cocktail of old and new, ancient yet American. The pageant was conceived as America’s answer to Oberammergau, a passion play performed in Bavaria since 1634 — it continues to this day — in which local people reenact Jesus’s last days. With this in mind I began to see this spectacle for what it was: the last vestige of a centuries-old tradition of outdoor religious theater, the heir to the medieval morality plays in which an “Everyman” faced some great temptation, undergoing a trial in which his soul hung in the balance — the creaky entertainments of the English countryside that Shakespeare watched as a child.
Yet there was something undeniably contemporary about this play and the religion it celebrated. I found it impossible to forget that this story had been written less than two centuries ago: the whole religion was as recent an invention as the lawn mower. And in its modernity it kept reminding me of that genre in which I’d taken refuge as an insomniac kid. It wasn’t just the soundtrack or the apparitions being staged; it was the terms I heard people casually using, like “spirit prison” and “Melchizedek Priesthood.” It was the fact that the Jesus statue at the Salt Lake Temple visitors’ center is backed by a huge mural of the Milky Way — an outer-space Jesus.

A scene during the opening night of Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 11, 2019.
So when I learned the pageant’s script had been written by Orson Scott Card, the controversial sci-fi novelist I’d read by the glow of the Light Boy, it rather put me over the edge. Card told me, when I tracked him down: “I’m on the record many times over, calling Mormonism a ‘science-fiction religion.’” He meant Mormon cosmology, an interstellar system graced with a lore to rival Dune, which crystallized in the 1820s — the decade that brought Mary Shelley’s best-known novels — and continued to be built out in the decades that followed, which saw luminaries like Jules Verne and, later, H. G. Wells.
What was the point of this sci-fi faith? All around me were clues: the fact that the cast saw themselves as creators of a celestial city on earth, here in this field. They called that city Zion, an ancient name for Jerusalem that Mormons have revived; they believe themselves charged with forging New Jerusalems now, modern microcosms of the ancient one that take shape wherever people gather, commit to the greater good, and thereby grow godlike. Mormonism is filled with such cobwebby concepts — and rites — dredged up from antiquity and given strange new life in contemporary America: they believe the Garden of Eden is in Jackson County, Missouri. The earliest Mormons performed exorcisms in the age of the first fax machines. And this was key, to faith and pageant both. They depended on a furious effort to resuscitate what was buried in a premodern past — ritual energies, characters, symbols — in the midst of modernity: a landscape of decaying interstates and shuttered malls, where these antique constructs sat as awkwardly as mastodons. Keep going, those around me seemed to say, arms outstretched like so many Gatsbys toward a dream of divinely charted existence. It can persist even here.
Morning bled into afternoon. I followed my next handler, an ebullient Filipino-American woman named Cherlyn, toward the outer edge of the Bowl. There, by the road, I watched a group of teens practice a scene called the Harvest Dance. The soundtrack featured a jaunty Disneyish waltz, which the directors played on a boom box while the teens cavorted. Here I noticed something I would go on observing during youth rehearsals: the directors called out, “This actually happened.”
An outsider might have perceived all this as akin to, I don’t know, the Middle Earth Festival, but to the cast, of course, it was tantamount to a Gettysburg reenactment: not fiction but received truth, a kernel of vision they had internalized and that, acorn-like, ramified into all they said and did. They were meant to emerge from this with the pivotal episodes of the Book of Mormon lodged in their muscle memory. (Surely no attendee at the Middle Earth Festival marvels afterward, “I finally get what Gandalf went through at Moria.”) What did it mean to sacralize a science fiction, ramping up its imaginative plot points to the status of historical fact?
An outsider might have perceived all this as akin to, I don’t know, the Middle Earth Festival, but to the cast, of course, it was tantamount to a Gettysburg reenactment: not fiction but received truth, a kernel of vision they had internalized and that, acorn-like, ramified into all they said and did.
Standing at the roadside, I saw a line of 18-wheelers parked beside the Bowl, their cargo spaces open. They held chairs. A coordinated army of cast members approached the trucks, took hold of the chairs, and carried them to the Bowl, wave after wave, trundling them by the thousands and fixing them in rows on the grass. A small city was taking shape here in a matter of days. It was a huge extrusion in the physical world of one guy’s imagination, of a wild saga inscribed in the brains and bodies of his followers. The kingdom, I saw, was here. Whether the vision that had birthed it was fact or fiction, historical record or fever-brained concoction, hardly seemed to matter.
Interlude: The Vision
Two hundred years ago, in a wood three miles from this field known as the Sacred Grove, a teenager arrived on an early-morning walk. He was shy and apparently unremarkable — poor, uneducated, the fifth of 11 kids. Joe Smith. He’d grown quieter of late, tormented by his sinfulness and the hypocrisy of those around him.
Across the region people were starved for the supernatural, for more than the standard church service could provide. Unlettered hicks spoke in tongues; farmers saw stuff in cornfields, preached the Second Coming of Christ in the flesh — and soon. The Smiths were steeped in that enthusiasm, practitioners of a backwoods occultism that led them to scour the land for buried treasure. He had a divining rod — a forked hazel branch he carried through the countryside, which he believed pointed toward riches in the earth — and with it a seer stone he held to his eye for the same purpose. Ludicrous and Tom Sawyerish, maybe — but then, the Western world was in a cusp-moment, caught between premodern magical thinking and an Enlightenment rationalism whose conquest was far from complete.
So: a teenager awash in magic, on an early-morning walk. He came to a clearing in the woods, knelt down to pray but couldn’t speak. Suddenly he heard footsteps behind him, shot up, and spun around, only to find no one. He stood there unable to shake the thought that he was being stalked, tracked down “by some actual being from the unseen world.” He would die. Just then, a pillar of light tunneled through the trees and staggered him. You’re forgiven, said a voice. All the churches have grown putrid. Go off and live virtuously.
What happened next is either unutterably enchanting or unsuitable for adult discussion. He went up to bed one night and began to pray, and as he did so his room flared with light and a paranormal being in a white robe hovered before him. He stated his name as Moroni; he had come to tell Smith of a new gospel buried in a hillside nearby — he specified where — inscribed on gold plates and bearing “an account of the former inhabitants of this continent and the source from whence they sprang.” Buried with the plates was a pair of seer stones like those he’d used to hunt after gold, which he would need to translate them. Go and find them, the thing urged him, dig them up, and translate them for the world. Then he vanished and the room grew dark.
That was how it started: as a poor boy’s dream of treasure, transmuted into divine longing. Gold gave way to God. He bided his time — got married — then set out one night with his new wife, Emma Hale, toward the hill. He found the appointed spot and began to dig — and while he toiled the being materialized again, watching over him. Hours later Smith descended the hillside with the plates swaddled in his coat like a live thing. Hale never saw them directly, but rather caressed them under cloth, feeling their metallic hardness, the grooves of their inscription.
The characters on the plates, he said, were written in something called reformed Egyptian. They needed translating. So he retired to a room with an assistant and, placing the covered plates on a table and one of the seer stones in a top hat, gazed into the hat and did something oracular. In the darkness of the hat the seer stone glowed, and above it a parchment materialized, upon which the characters appeared, and below them their English translation. Smith spoke what he saw while the assistant, rapt, transcribed. He unspooled a saga of ancient American tribes from Jerusalem — their feudings, visit from Christ, the better tribe’s extinction. The work was finished by June 1829, hitting the shelves at a local bookstore as the Book of Mormon the following year. It was a feat of magic: Smith pulled a world religion out of a hat.
Whether you find the product unreadable (Mark Twain called it “chloroform in print”) or discover in it a mystical document on par with the Bhagavad Gita is a matter of personal temperament. If you are like me, you are apt to see in Smith an early writer of speculative fiction. It’s not just the supernaturalism of his saga; it’s that it has a strong element of the seriality that typifies the genre: whatever Smith’s plates really consisted of — and no one outside his innermost circle ever saw them — he used them as the basis for a sprawling piece of Bible fanfic. The Book of Mormon is a superfan’s paean to the King James Bible: there’s a reworking of Exodus, but instead of Moses there is Lehi, leading his people not to Canaan but to America. An ark of sorts bears them there. There are ancient submarines worthy of Jules Verne. Above all there are Jesus’s dealings in the Americas post-resurrection — The Further Adventures of Jesus Christ.
There’s a term known to lovers of science fiction — namely, retroactive continuity (“retcon” for short). It describes how writers take an existing series and reinterpret its details to make possible the series’ continuance. At its best, retconning can breathe new life into a stagnant franchise; at its worst it’s a cringey affront to the audience’s memory and intelligence, the author scarcely acknowledging some preposterous contradiction with what came before. Think of Star Wars: in The Return of the Jedi Palpatine dies decisively, hurled down a reactor shaft by Darth Vader. But in The Rise of Skywalker, in a WTF-caliber retcon, he’s simply…back. (“Somehow,” a character remarks airily, “Palpatine returned.”) Mormonism constantly retcons the Bible: in John 10:16 Jesus tells his disciples cryptically, “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring.” Does he mean the Israelites in the next county over? No, Smith revealed; he means he has to go materialize amid chocolate, maize, ocelots, preaching before Native Americans. For that matter, Adam and Eve lived in the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan Area.
Transposed to the religious realm, retroactive continuity becomes a gesture of defiance, a refusal to let the series — the Judeo-Christian franchise, nearly two millennia old — come to an end. The U.S. into which Smith was born was undergoing a spiritual stagnation not unlike our own: in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, religious participation was shockingly low. Just 17 percent of Americans in 1776 belonged to a church. In his “Divinity School Address” a few decades later, Ralph Waldo Emerson bemoaned “the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society.” “Half parishes,” he noted, “are signing off.”
How do you thwart a large-scale decay of faith? It is as a response to this question that Smith and Mormonism speak pressingly to us now. Smith’s answer was to insist that revelation was ongoing, that ancient scripture could be opened up and revised — continued — with new visions that drew on the old but retreaded them for a nascent U.S. “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead,” Emerson complained. So Smith revived it, retconning the Bible into a new myth, a sequel with America at its center: America was the site of Eden, of a Christ visit; in the end, it would be where humanity gathered to await the Second Coming.
“He waged a resistance movement against disenchantment,” Richard Bushman, Smith’s 90-year-old biographer, born into the church, told me. That was the conceptual engine at the heart of this sci-fi faith and the pageant that celebrated it. They were modern re-enchantment projects, huge sweaty efforts to counteract disbelief with the jumper cables of a resuscitated myth. Here, in the middle of contemporary life — on a hill in upstate New York — God was fully, thrillingly alive.
Tuesday late-afternoon
The cast Wi-Fi password was “ComeUntoChrist.” It was 4:30 now and hot, and I was tired and irritable. There was no coffee to be had on pageant grounds, I was beyond the reach of my 4G LTE service and, worse, weary of the constant supervision. They were so damned nice, the escorts — but their niceness couldn’t conceal the fact that I was being surveilled. It was odd: there’s a thriving subreddit called r/exmormon, where apostate Mormons vent and defiantly proclaim their indulgence in masturbation, Jim Beam, lattés. Had I been after dirt on the church, did Salt Lake City really think I needed to travel halfway across the country to get it?
But there was a Hill Cumorah Wi-Fi network, and it was cool if I used it (I imagined 90 percent of the internet being blocked) — and I was walking now with a handler named Kristin a stone’s throw from a restroom hut. I decided to stage a mini-rebellion: I would go into the hut and camp out, getting my internet fix and some alone time. What if Kristin gave up and left before I came out?
She walked me to the hut and I went inside, entering a stall where I stayed forever — answering texts, checking all the things. At last I washed up, drew a breath and left the hut, glancing about. The coast was clear. I felt an influx of giddiness that was choked off when, some 25 yards away, I spotted Kristin beaming at me and waving. I plodded my way to her like a guilty spaniel, but when I reached her she showed no sign of annoyance. “Hey!” she cried. I half-expected her to add, “How’d it go?!”
She handed me off to my next chaperone, Scott, the middle-aged ex-CEO of a street hockey league. Scott’s kindness was more than skin-deep, a preternatural goodwill that made me briefly forget my annoyance at being monitored. His affect was fully Fred Rogers, his eye contact unswerving as a Mack Truck. What was my background? he inquired. Former academic, I said. Scott gazed mutely into my eyes and thence my soul for some five seconds. “That’s why you’re so thoughtful,” he said at last.
We headed toward the stage. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the greatest organization in all the world,” Scott said, “because it can pull people together to get great things done like this, in such short periods of time.” He cited the church’s readiness to aid communities stricken by natural disaster: when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, droves of Mormon volunteers rushed to the scene, bringing food and manpower well before the U.S. government had lifted a finger.
He cited the church’s readiness to aid communities stricken by natural disaster: when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, droves of Mormon volunteers rushed to the scene, bringing food and manpower well before the U.S. government had lifted a finger.
When we got to the stage I saw that dress rehearsals were underway. Here I had my first glimpse of the costumed ancient Americans. The latter, I should pause to explain, are the reason the pageant and the Book of Mormon can make for distressing experiences. The book posits that two tribes, the Nephites and Lamanites, lived in the pre-Columbian Americas, and that the Lamanites, having killed off the Nephites, became the peoples now known as Native Americans. What makes this origin story especially painful is its timing: the Book of Mormon was published in March 1830, two months before President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the U.S. government to force Native peoples off their ancestral lands and relocate them west of the Mississippi. And it was marketed as a history of the Native Americans, who came, it revealed, from Jerusalem. While Indigenous people were being shunted westward in death marches like the Trail of Tears, their history was being quietly overlaid by the visions of a white kid from upstate New York. It was its own Indian Removal.
I should clarify that however gruesome these origins, the LDS church is now a multiethnic phenomenon with more members outside the U.S. than in it — and plenty of these members balance clear-eyed critique with a regard for what they find redemptive in the faith: often, its contention that revelation is continuous and anyone can have it. Still, this much is clear: Mormonism is a modern re-enchantment project that took shape on a continent populated, to begin with, by people who never saw themselves as bereft of wonder. “We as Indigenous people never were kicked out of our Garden of Eden,” Elise Boxer, both a practicing Mormon and an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, told me. “That’s where we live.”
Gazing at the stage now, I saw that on either side, two groups of about 20 teens — white as Wonder Bread, clad in skirts rather like Navajo quilts — practiced a battle dance while the soundtrack blared. They brandished spears. One group played the Nephites, the other the Lamanites; it was a call-and-response. At its close the two groups chanted, “Hah!”

A couple take a selfie in the golden, end of day light, just prior to the start of the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.
Closer at hand I saw other players decked out as ancient Americans. Some wore headdresses containing feathers, plus beaded necklaces and shirts decorated with pelts; another wore a kilt studded with turquoise. Still others were clad in a different sort of outfit that looked not Native but vaguely biblical: gem-filled headdresses, purple and emerald robes that undulated in the breeze. These were the fugitives who flee Jerusalem toward the start of the pageant. At one point I saw the (partially costumed) man playing Joseph Smith stroll by in a khaki nineteenth-century tailcoat and wig, plus cargo shorts; he paused to share a joke with a Nephite man in a feathered headdress and kilt. Watching them chortle together I wondered if I might be on whippits.
The redface, though. It was in such cartoonishly bad taste, it was hard to balance with the extreme kindliness, the charity, that the cast radiated. (Later I asked one of the escorts, “Is it okay for a nearly all-white cast to dress up as Native Americans?” She replied, “Please don’t ruin anyone’s day by asking them that.”) I thought of the Boston Tea Party, whose dissidents dressed up as Mohawk Indians. Writing now, I think of the storming of the Capitol — of the Q Shaman, whose aesthetic was less Viking than Native. Why, in precisely those moments when they wanted to trumpet their identity to the world, did Americans play Indian dress-up?
The redface, though. It was in such cartoonishly bad taste, it was hard to balance with the extreme kindliness, the charity, that the cast radiated. (Later I asked one of the escorts, “Is it okay for a nearly all-white cast to dress up as Native Americans?” She replied, “Please don’t ruin anyone’s day by asking them that.”)
Scott turned to me: “How would you like to be in a scene?” Over his shoulder I saw two teens in Native gear, at ease during a lull in rehearsal, doing the “Raise the Roof” dance. “We’re going to do a run-through of the New World Multitude scene. You can be a Nephite.” Processing this, I felt my visage crumple into a constipated expression. This was the climax of the pageant, when the risen Christ appears among the Natives. For an instant I pictured myself — tired, angry, emanating B.O. — unwillingly donning a headdress, then being embraced and kissed by Jesus. That image, in turn, being uploaded to the pageant’s Instagram, then picked up by the Salt Lake Tribune and going low-key viral. My alarmed friends blowing up my phone: “Yo, call me as soon as you get this.”
But it was to be a street-clothes rehearsal (aside from Jesus), which seemed less risky. Soon cast members, hundreds, began congregating at the foot of the stage. They arrived in waves. It was early evening and the atmosphere had grown expectant, alive with the ambient power that can only come from a concentration of bodies outside. And, of course, Jesus was coming.
Together we trekked up the hill, taking our places at stations on either side of the stage. I was a knot of anxiety: Was this okay? The Nephites were a made-up people; wasn’t it impossible to appropriate a culture that hadn’t existed? But then I recalled the faux-Native getup I’d just seen, the chants. I couldn’t possibly go through with it. Also, wasn’t I partaking in a sacred myth I didn’t believe in — and didn’t that mean I was appropriating Mormon culture? I felt mired in layers of wrongdoing; I was losing my shit.
Suddenly they flipped on the soundtrack and the scene started. All around me cast members were looking toward the top of the stage as if entranced, and I followed their gaze and stopped cold. It was him: it was Jesus Christ. Shoulder-length auburn wig with middle part. Synthetic beard. White robe, brown sandals. He looked like the Jesus from the gaudy religious pictures I’d seen in older relatives’ homes — except he was standing atop Chichen Itza.
He had a beam of light trained on him, and stood motionless with arms outspread and palms turned upward, a radiant wisp against the New York sky. He could have been a superhero. “I am the light and the life of the world,” he lip-synched. Joyous choral music ensued; the voice of God sounded through the speakers: “Behold my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased.” As the carol continued, the hundreds of cast members filtered onto the stage, a massed and carefully patterned congregation. Scott, beside me, nodded: it was our turn.
We found our places and stood still. Jesus, still at the top of the edifice, dropped his hands. There was a central staircase leading down the stage, and he began to descend it, the beam of light staying with him. “Arise, and come forth unto me,” he mouthed. I scarcely recognized him from the casting ceremony. His name was Austin Reid, and he had gone from an early 20-something who ran an online outdoor-gear company to a sort of ghost, lordly and wraithlike and totally self-assured. “Thrust your hand into my side,” he pronounced — and a lone player walked up the steps and did just that. “Now you know that I am the God of Israel,” he said. “The God of the whole earth.”
Players rushed to greet him, in keeping with the script, but it seemed they were hardly acting — just viewing him as the thing he represented, genuinely magnetized. Some he touched, healingly; others he embraced. The chorus swelled to a refrain of “Hallelujah.” Near me a young mom held a toddler who cried, “We have to go! Take me to Jesus!”
I looked out across the landscape to the road below, where an SUV drove by, and imagined the driver sipping a coffee and glancing up at us innocently and then spraying the coffee. The road was Route 21, which I’d lived off of growing up. Then I glanced back at Jesus, encircled by players who, by tomorrow, would be dressed in the Native costumes I’d seen earlier. I felt full-force the scene’s terrible ambiguity. You could have called it, rightly, a disturbing symbolic drama in which a white Jesus literally descended to dispense wisdom and salvation to Indigenous people. In that sense it was the epitome of a colonial mindset that had produced the Indian Removal Act.
At the same time, it was a stunning piece of outdoor religious theater: ordinary people were acting out ultimate things amid gnats, birds, trees — and doing so despite a wider culture that had mostly abandoned outdoor theater and, increasingly, ultimate things. They were ushering in a new reality: the scene’s title meant not just the premodern Americas but life now, made annually novel, alive with ghostly energy, by this hillside ritual. It was a defibrillator to the heart of an old and disenchanted world.
Wednesday pre-dawn
I woke at 5:00 a.m. the next morning in my Airbnb, a rural guesthouse, peeled back the sheets and found a large white spider beside me. I barked, shot out of bed and, unthinkingly, dressed and set out driving.
It was still dark. It is strange to drive the roads of the region where one is from when one’s family is gone from there; stranger still if the region is western New York. If you are from this place, you can understand how a religion started here. There’s a feral rawness to its woods, and the roads that lead through them are lonely and trance-inducing. The fields are limitless: you ramble through them, and when you get to the end, seemingly, there is only more field, as in a dream or a prefiguration of eternity.

A woman recalls her story of deciding to join the LDS faith (being saved) during ‘Devotional’ at the days end, but just prior to the dress rehearsal performance of The Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.
I was thinking about Joe Smith. On a morning like this he’d had his first vision. What got me, though, was what came after: how he spent his life expanding this Bible fanfic into a cosmology that millions lived in. The way he disclosed that cosmology — it reminded me of nothing so much as the pulp science-fiction magazines that, a century later, marked that genre’s golden age: Amazing Stories. Other Worlds. (Scientology, itself a sci-fi faith, began in one of these.) Smith revealed his cosmos one mind-blowing installment at a time. His visions were serialized in a sense, separated by months sometimes; converts awaited each with the bated breath of cult fandoms biding their time till a new issue, volume or episode drops. Only the stakes were everything: their destinies, the nature of the universe, and of their souls.
Here is what he revealed: God was an embodied extraterrestrial who lived near a distant star called Kolob — and if by some marvel we could see him, “if the veil were rent today,” we would find ourselves eerily mirrored. It was the 1840s and telescopes had grown more sophisticated. People peered through them expecting to see God, and when they didn’t, they merely concluded he lay beyond the reach even of these new instruments. Smith’s story was of its time in that sense, but added a crucial wrinkle: God had been one of us but upgraded himself into a superior being. The purpose of our own lives was to replicate his ascent, becoming ourselves gods who would populate our own planets after death, parents of new creation. “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” Smith thundered to his followers just before his death. “That is the great secret.”
Smith’s was an extremely American drama — bootstraps individualism given mythic form by a man who’d spent his youth in poverty, hunting treasure. How could you get more upwardly mobile than to become a god? There was a catch, though: no one could attain godhood singly; we got there as units — by marrying and having children — which sounds like a championing of the nuclear family, and is, to an extent. Beneath this, though, lay something more poignant: an insistence that we need each other, that we’re interlocked by spokes of dependency, our souls’ progress conjoined. The Mormon heaven is social: in death we find ourselves surrounded, in thriving celestial hubs, by the people we loved in life. To the extent we perfect our bonds with them here, now, we are already there.
I went on driving, watching woods give way to drumlins, remote roads to residential ones. I made my way by instinct down one such road, scudding by silos and houses just lighting up, and veering at last onto a steep street I climbed and then pulled over. I looked at the silhouette of the house I’d grown up in, warm now with other lives. I’d not seen it in 15 years. In the stillness I heard our voices as they’d sounded when we were gathered in this place: children’s screaming laughter, my dad belting out Grateful Dead songs, my mom in her bathrobe laughingly chiding him. It occurred to me that in the Mormon heaven I would never lose these people. I saw my bedroom and me in it at night, already dogged by the insomnia that would rack me as an adult and driven, for distraction, to books. The reading was a kind of prayer, as all fiction-reading is. Hands close together, I lay summoning what was invisible, miraculous: aliens, unfathomed planets, unseen forces that governed all we did.
The memory of these stories blended in my head now with Mormon myth, and I had the sense that they had sprung from the same impulse. Mormonism and science fiction were modern inventions that responded to a new reality, one increasingly dominated by scientific thinking and the technology it bred. People found themselves in a Copernican universe far vaster and more impersonal than the biblical heavens, and one way to react to this new normal was to discover in space itself — its stars and planets and imagined denizens — the stuff of religious awe. So in science fiction, the wonder and terror long inspired by the Judeo-Christian God, and by angels and devils, gets remapped onto aliens; visitations become visitors. In Mormonism, God is an alien; we are all incipient aliens, bound up in a project of collective deification.
In the stillness I heard our voices as they’d sounded when we were gathered in this place: children’s screaming laughter, my dad belting out Grateful Dead songs, my mom in her bathrobe laughingly chiding him. It occurred to me that in the Mormon heaven I would never lose these people.
Why did it matter, this drive to enchant? I thought again of that spiritual desiccation I had glimpsed in myself and my students. And of what I’d seen on the ground that week: people supercharged by a modern myth that insisted on the sociality of salvation, a retconning finally of redemption itself, which held that we are delivered as collectives or not at all. It was a mythos for the era of disasters. It lay behind the Mormon response to Katrina, and lately COVID-19, which saw bishop’s storehouses, positioned around the globe, bring nearly one hundred million pounds of food to beleaguered populations in 2020.
Was the culture I belonged to — a culture of unbelief that wanted, nonetheless, to confront the catastrophes ahead, which threatened to tilt reality toward science fiction — capable of such feats of social strength? My time here had made me skeptical. Because belief was the crux of it, the impetus behind the directors’ calling out to the young cast: this actually happened. That was what elevated their story from sci-fi to scripture, from Dune to an architecture of revealed truths in whose image they remade the world. What did I or my friends — secular, overeducated, climate-terrified yet basically inert — have to rival that?
In order for people to abandon their self-interest and commit to a grand cause, writes Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life, something has to happen to their aesthetic being — that part of them that is sensory and emotional. They have to fall in love. “One must be enamored with existence,” she writes, “to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.” Put baldly, “You have to love life before you can care about anything.” Enchantment turns out to be the precondition for committed political life together — a way of charming people toward self-transcendence with a vision of existence that pulses with animacy and purpose. Ethical codes are stillborn without such visions; they can’t catch unless people are inflamed by some story of their lives capable of drawing from them, again and again, virtuous performances.
Thursday
Opening day. Morning.
Across the grounds people bustled. Some drove golf carts. On the Bowl, cast members did last-minute run-throughs while directors, clutching at walkie-talkies, fine-tuned and fretted. The air crackled with promise.
I had arrived late. There had been a dry run of the New World Multitude scene and I had played hooky, having decided against the part. Now I strode with Scott through the cast area, where a mood of serenity had set in. People were finding each other. They sat in clusters outside the tents, playing guitars and singing, touching each other reassuringly and laughing. I had never witnessed a pilgrimage. I saw people divorced from their workaday lives who — bathless, deviceless — had been deprived into clarity.
“Everything else is stripped away,” said a girl named Emily.
“It’s a very similar feeling, I would imagine, to when people converge on disasters, and they’ll sacrifice of their own to give to some cause,” added another kid, Jonathan. “Everyone’s made some sacrifice to be here. And love is at the center of that.”
I went on walking, surveying all I saw with the attention one bestows on something about to vanish. No one knew, of course, that this was the last pageant — that the pandemic would obliterate the planned finale — but there was something valedictory about it all. The show needed revision — the redface had to go — yet it seemed a pity that this huge, weird piece of Americana, which had survived into the age of TikTok, was ending because a 94-year-old man in Salt Lake City had demanded it should. The church’s official line was that it wanted people focusing on their home lives — scripture-reading, prayer — not theater. This sounded like a cover for wanting to save money, issued by an institution that as of 2020 had $100 billion in assets.
Morning blurred into afternoon, afternoon into evening. Somehow, the premiere was close at hand; the cast left to change.
For once unchaperoned, I followed a party of players toward a costume house at the hill’s southwest end. Here, as players disappeared behind curtains, I took in a scene that included an entire wall stocked with boxes containing beards, each labeled. There was NEW WORLD MULTITUDE SAVIOR and, beside it, UNBELIEVER #1. “They’re all made of human hair,” said a voice beside me. It belonged to a spectacled seamstress named Jackie. “A beard can take a year to make.” There were hundreds. She plucked a box off the wall — VISION SAVIOR, the lesser Jesus — and opened it. “Church members donate their hair for these,” she murmured, dangling a reddish pelt before my face. I gaped at what was at once the beard of God’s son and the Norelco trimmings of some ginger guy in Utah, then turned away.
All emerged from the costume house dressed and I followed, watching as they rambled down the hill. There they were joined by the clad players from the other houses, several streams of people made suddenly mythic, who came together in one teeming body aimed, I saw, for the devotional pavilion. Beyond them I glimpsed the Bowl, swarming now with spectators — thousands—staking out chairs. With a giddy solemnity the cast crowded into the pavilion, ranging in rows — characters from a Mesoamerican past brushing shoulders with those from Jacksonian America. A director led them in a last prayer, after which they sang a hymn called “God Speed the Right,” then marched out to meet the crowd.
I walked with them. The premiere was slated for 9:00 p.m., and it was 7:30; this time had been allotted for the players to mingle with the audience. I watched the graying cherub playing Joseph Smith — Willy Wonka-ish in top hat, tailcoat, and breeches — get swiftly engulfed by stans seeking selfies. Vision Savior, who worked in Big Oil and lived year-round in Saudi Arabia, flashed me a beatific smile, then turned to greet a family of eight.
I surveyed the acreage of people before me and, in the gathering darkness, ventured in. It was the most international of crowds. I met a family that had flown in from Honduras that day, and when the show was over would return by red-eye flight. I met a party of women from the Sichuan province of China who’d been born into Buddhism but converted as adults to Mormonism, enticed by the emphasis on family.
At this point I became aware that the weary cynicism that had steered me to this place was being dislodged by something else. A doubt about my doubt? The energy, the immense shared electricity coursing through this outdoor cathedral, unmoored me. A man in the missionary getup — mid-50s, indefatigable as a jackrabbit — pulled me aside, training laserlike gray eyes on mine. “I teach economics and finance at Columbia. These are not individuals lacking in intelligence,” he said, gesturing across the crowd. “They’re brilliant.” He had fused his spiritual and logical intelligence, he needed me to know, into “an incredible technicolor understanding.”
Whatever unsteadiness I was feeling, it seemed a consequence of being inundated by thousands of worshippers. I suppose I would’ve felt the same approaching the Kaaba at Hajj. I met two women from Massachusetts who spoke to me of the afterlife with such passionate certitude, such detail, they could’ve been returning tourists. “The amazing love that exists on the other side of the veil is outstanding,” one said. They spoke of becoming kings and queens in death — of deification — and with gentle firmness stressed how I needed to pray to receive personal revelation. When I asked how — was there a wikiHow? — they laughed: “Just talk to God. Just ask Him.” (Earlier, in private, the pageant president had told me the same, more forcefully: “You have to kneel down and ask!”)
At this point I became aware that the weary cynicism that had steered me to this place was being dislodged by something else. A doubt about my doubt?
All at once the cast vanished, full night came on and the show started. I found a seat. In the dark, a cluster of robed women appeared atop the stage, flourishing apocalyptic trumpets they pretended to play while an epic fanfare sounded through the speakers. The cast marched onstage, an army, some bearing flags — and as they assumed their places in an opening tableau there were whoops and whistles in the crowd.
All went semi-dark. A group of players danced and jumped while the narrator, an omniscient father-figure who sounded like Charlton Heston, set the scene: Jerusalem, 600 BC. Depravity reigns. Lehi, the Mormon Moses, and his son Nephi have visions foretelling Jerusalem’s destruction and Jesus’s coming. They need to flee. The visions took the form of “water curtains,” big cumulus mists plumed up from understage, through which apparitions shone: a manger, a tree, a middle-aged angel high above the stage who for years dangled from a cable but in 2019 stood on a hidden platform. The production quality lay between full-on professional and DIY.
It started raining; babies cried. Someone farted. I watched the fugitives cross the Atlantic in that wooden boat, limousines-long; their arrival in the Americas and campy harvest dance; the fracturing of the party into rival tribes.
The show’s climactic sequence kicked into motion. “Far away, on a hill outside Jerusalem, three crosses rose,” the narrator announced. At the upper-right corner of the stage a trio of crucifixes swung into view, thronged by flames, then vanished. A stage-wide inferno followed — the cataclysm that killing Jesus triggered here. I watched as firebombs burst, geysers shot up, and waterfalls plummeted; I saw the silhouettes of a few hundred cast running about screaming while, below us, the earth convulsed with subterranean sound.
Total darkness and silence ensued. Then the risen Jesus appeared, this little refulgent being clad in white and perched at the pinnacle of the stage. It had always borne the seeds of sci-fi, the Christian story — an otherworldly emissary, the logos incarnate, sent here on an errand to save us — and here Jesus looked like nothing so much as a lone visitor. His person was mediated by streaks of rain. It was so quiet across the Bowl, a deep and babyless silence. Lights slowly came on, and I watched the scene I’d acted in two days before: Jesus descending the staircase, the cast filtering onto the stage, all surrounding and venerating him. Around me, people started crying.
The scene ended and they told of the two tribes going to war afterward, of the Nephites’ dying off — but not before one of them, Moroni, had buried their history in this hill. It’s hard to convey the all-out weirdness of the next, final episode. “Centuries later, in the spring of 1820,” the narrator declared, “the Lord heard the earnest prayer of a young man named Joseph Smith.” There was Smith excavating the hillside while Moroni supervised; there he was sharing the good news with a bunch of New Yorkers in bonnets, corsets, suit jackets. It was impossible to ignore how meta — how postmodern, really — it was: the abrupt fast-forwarding 14 centuries, the found text which is the very text you’re watching, the author inserting himself into the story. It was at once deeply moving and reminiscent of a senior thesis by a screenwriting major.
The show concluded and the Bowl resounded with cheering. Anxious to beat the crush, I got up and hastened away. Rain fell more heavily. When I reached the roadside I turned and took in the scene a last time: the multitudes gathered on the grass like groundlings, as they’d gathered here nearly a century; the cast advancing to meet them; the whole thing an international city, the shadow-image of the ones they hoped to form in death. And the driven rain deluging it, in effect, out of existence.

The character of Jesus Christ rises above horn players at the end of the The Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.
I found my car and drove off, making my way back to the guesthouse, where I peeled off my wet clothes and stood a moment savoring the silence. Then, warily, I approached the bed. What I wanted to do I had never once tried, despite being almost 37 — and couldn’t at first. What brought intelligent people, brilliant people, to kneel?
Nevertheless, I lowered myself, placing my knees on the tile and feeling the soreness in my nearly middle-aged body, no longer that of the boy who’d arrived to bed each night seeking communion with the spirit world. To whom or what was I even kneeling? Jesus Christ? The phrase embarrassed me. The embodied God who’d preceded us in space?
A line from Wallace Stevens came to me: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” I couldn’t decide whether this was sublime or Orwellian. Still, I brought my hands together and asked — to be more inspired, surprised, tuned to a godly frequency that as yet I hardly heard — and felt something unfamiliar: a peace that was either grace itself or the relief of giving up control. This I let linger, studying it, till it got really late — till the imprint of the day, of the whole mad pilgrimage, began to weaken, eroded by the sound of rain hitting the guesthouse, great percussive drops that drew me by degrees to sleep.
***
Andrew Kay is a writer, editor, and teacher who lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Editors: Ben Huberman and Jon Baskin (The Point Magazine)
Fact Checker: Julia Aizuss (The Point Magazine)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, and Paul Kiel, Arno Kopecky, Isaac Würmann, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and Laura Spinney.
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Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, Paul Kiel | ProPublica | June 8, 2021 | 5,717 words
“ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.”
Arno Kopecky | Hakai Magazine | June 1, 2021 | 6,100
“A drama 150 years in the making is playing out as logging companies and police clash with First Nations and protesters over one of British Columbia’s last remaining stands of unprotected old-growth forest.”
Isaac Würmann | Maisonneuve | May 11, 2021 | 5,738 words
“When Isaac Würmann’s relationship began to crumble, he started seeking out examples of queer love elsewhere. It turns out, he didn’t have to look far.”
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal | Oxford American | June 1, 2021 | 6,937 words
“He sits on the edge of the bed to compose and work through songs, facing an amp, while I curl into his velvet-lined guitar case and listen…I have called up this memory so many times I feel the gauze of fiction starting to overlay its details. But it is a memory so dear, I reanimate it against the heaviness of the present—my father, full of promise and possibility, years before the shell he would become, now shut away in my childhood bedroom in the graying light of ever-closed blinds.”
Laura Spinney | The Guardian | June 8, 2021 | 5,455 words
“Today, many circus elephants in Europe are reaching old age. Campaigners want them placed in specially built sanctuaries, where they can enjoy retirement with their own kind. But their owners insist that for the elephants, being separated from their human “families” would be traumatic.”

This week, we’re sharing stories from Victor Luckerson, Tristin Hopper, John Drescher, Steve Shorney, and Pamela Petro.
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Victor Luckerson | The New Yorker | May 28, 2021 | 2,882 words
“Today, the work done by Parrish in the nineteen-twenties and Gates in the nineteen-nineties forms the bedrock for books, documentaries, and a renewed reparations push that, a century after the massacre, is experiencing a groundswell of support.”
Tristin Hopper | The Vancouver Sun | May 29, 2021 | 1,700
“This week saw the discovery of something outside Kamloops, B.C., rarely seen in North America, much less in any corner of the developed world: Unmarked and previously forgotten graves, all belonging to children who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”
John Drescher | The Assembly | May 30, 2021 | 3,00 words
“UNC-Chapel Hill’s largest journalism-school donor warned against Nikole Hannah-Jones’ hiring. Their divergent views represent a new front in the debate over objectivity and the future of the field.”
Steve Shorney | The Independent | May 30, 2021 | 5,663 words
“I had seen an alternative reality, another way of being, and knew beyond anything I’d known before that day that life is extraordinary. And in that moment I felt happier, more alive, and more Me than I imagined was possible.”
Pamela Petro | Guernica Magazine | May 24, 2021 | 4,044 words
“On becoming a kitchen archivist.”

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?
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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.
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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.
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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

Dogs have long had a place by people’s side, and hundreds of years ago in southern British Columbia, small-sized domestic dogs were particularly abundant — although for a rather surprising reason: their fur. Elders from the Nuu-chah-nulth communities on Vancouver Island’s west coast and Coast Salish elders on the island’s east coast and the mainland have an oral history detailing these dogs — which were small, white, fluffy, and loved. Women weavers would care for the dogs, who lived isolated on small islands to prevent interbreeding with hunting dogs. They were fed a special diet and a couple of times a year were sheered like sheep for their wool coats, out of which the women made blankets.
As Virginia Morell explains for Hakai Magazine, the arrival of the Hudson Bay company, and with it a supply of cheap blankets, gradually destroyed the need for the wool dogs, which merged with other domestic dogs and disappeared. Proving their existence has been a challenge for archaeologists. However, over the years new avenues of research have shown the importance of these dogs — with a particular breakthrough being made in 2002, when historian Candace Wellman in Bellingham, Washington opened a drawer and found a woollen pelt. The owner? A fluffy white dog from 1859 called Mutton.
Sometime before 1858, Mutton, a wooly dog, had found himself a new keeper, George Gibbs, a 19th-century ethnographer with the Pacific Railroad Survey and the Northwest Boundary Survey. Gibbs studied the customs and languages of peoples in the Pacific Northwest, and in his notes on the Nisqually language, he recorded the name of the dog wool blankets as Ko-matl’-ked. Mutton likely came from a Coast Salish village in British Columbia. Gibbs named the dog for his love of chasing sheep.
Not too much is known about Mutton in life, though apparently goats also attracted him. In 1859, Mutton ate the head off a mountain goat skin that was in Gibbs’s care, bringing a colleague to near tears. Naturalist C. B. R. Kennerly had meant to send the skin as a specimen to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. “[Gibbs] sent it to me yesterday & when I opened the bag & saw the injury I could almost have cried,” Kennerly wrote in a letter. And more ominously, he added, “Mutton was sheared a short time ago, & as soon as his hair grows out we will make a specimen of him.” Which they did, at some point. In death, Mutton has shared the very essence of himself—his pelt—likely the only known wool dog hide to exist.

Growing up in England, my knowledge of bears largely came from Yogi Bear cartoons, and on a childhood holiday to North America, it wasn’t Disneyland, but the thought of seeing a real-life Yogi that I was most excited about. However, despite my parents stoically driving a hire car down treacherous mountain roads as I lounged in the back bemoaning the lack of performing bears, it never happened.
It wasn’t until I moved to Canada many years later that I saw my first bear. I just turned a corner and there it was, a young black bear casually munching grass, completely unphased by my open-mouthed awe. Several years on, I have seen countless black bears; in fact, they rather enjoy relieving themselves on my front lawn after overindulging in next door’s apple trees. But my childhood wonder of them remains.
I am not the only one drawn to the subject; bears have inspired some wonderful articles, so I’ve compiled a reading list of six stories that not only look at bears, but the emotions and issues that they provoke.
In this article, Brian Payton shows grizzly bears to be intrepid explorers “destined to wander” — with male grizzlies swimming up to seven kilometers to find new territories. I found myself hypnotized by a map included in the piece, which tracks a grizzly bear as it travels an incredible 850 kilometers over five months. The positive side of grizzly bears turning up in new places is that, after decades of persecution, their numbers are finally improving and young males are looking to move away from “all these big dudes.” On the other hand, this means potential human conflict: “We know they will coexist with us. Their survival depends on our willingness to coexist with them.”
A bear emerges from dense vegetation and pauses on the shore. It’s early spring, and the young grizzly has only recently roused from hibernation, ravenous and driven. He lifts his head and gazes out across the falling tide to the opposite shore, where forested slopes are close enough to make out individual trees. The bear stands and sniffs the air.
Grizzlies can see about as well as we can, but it’s their olfactory powers—at least 2,000 times more acute than ours—that most likely set them in motion. We’ll never grasp how they perceive the world, let alone what they’re thinking. For some reason, this bear falls back on all fours, ambles away from prime habitat, and wades into the sea.
To reach the far shore, he dog-paddles west across Johnstone Strait, one of the narrowest navigable channels that make up the fabled Inside Passage. This stretch of water separates the North American mainland from the largest island on the Pacific coast, British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. It’s only three to 4.5 kilometers across but anywhere from 70 to 500 meters deep. Swift tidal currents can reach 15 kilometers per hour. Vessels of every description pass through, from kayaks to freighters, to cruise ships carrying thousands of passengers. At this time of year, the water temperature averages about 8 °C, but the bear has almost no fat left to insulate him from the cold.
One place in which grizzly bears are more prevalent than ever is in Wuikinuxv, British Columbia. Jimmy Thomson’s beautiful piece highlights the respect that this First Nations community gives their frequent visitors. The bears are valued as an important part of the ecosystem: “In eating the salmon, the bears bridge the gap between the deep ocean and the treetops, dragging the wriggling essence of one ecosystem into another.” This article is full of such powerful imagery, and Thomson’s respect for the people who wish to defend these animals is apparent.
Adam Nelson pulls the band’s truck into the small landfill less than a kilometer from the village, as he does three times a week to keep bear attractants out of people’s homes, and honks his horn to avoid startling any nearby bears. He and Corey Hanuse toss the village’s garbage bags into the landfill and wait. Minutes later a large grizzly is tearing the bags apart.
An electrified fence around the landfill, installed at great expense, lasted three days. The bears pulled it open like a can of sardines and it hasn’t been repaired. Later, someone stole the batteries. The bears have become accustomed now to the easy food the dump has on offer, and most days it’s possible to find them snacking amongst the detritus. Better there than roaming the village.
Bear intrusions are not so welcome in other areas. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s article documents life in Grafton, New Hampshire, where residents believe “in untethering themselves from institution, foraging for food, and hunting game with guns, arrows, and knives.” Hongoltz-Hetling discovers a deep-rooted conflict in Grafton between man and bear, explaining the drama with a colorful array of local stories — about eaten cats and bear-fighting llamas, for instance — that tell us as much about the characters and colloquialisms of Grafton as about the bears themselves.
With bears reaching peak boogie man status, Hongoltz-Hetling also hears whispers of a darker side to the conflict — vigilante posses embarking on clandestine hunts of bears sleeping in their dens, even though “a person was (and still is) much more likely to suffocate in a giant vat of corn than be killed by a bear.” This article is an intriguing insight into small-town life — told through the bears.
Can bears be calculating? Babiarz and other Grafton residents I spoke to sure seemed to think so. Dave Thurber, a Vietnam War veteran who lives up the road from Jessica Soule, recounted how, one dark winter night, he had a feeling that something wasn’t right. He peeled back a corner of the curtains covering his living room windows and peered out at the front lawn, where he spotted a bear delicately licking sunflower seeds from a bird feeder. When a car approached, the bear flattened itself against a snowbank like an escaping prisoner evading a watchtower spotlight. After the car passed, the bear resumed eating.
Rumors of the bears’ cunning had planted unsettling questions in the minds of Grafton residents: How close are we to a bear right now? Could one be just beyond someone’s front door or hiding behind a nearby tree, casing a pet or, worse, someone’s child?
How do you manage conflict between humans and bears when it escalates? That’s a dilemma faced by many park rangers. In the Yogi Bear cartoons, Yogi was a cheeky chap who loved to steal the odd picnic basket from guests at his home in Jellystone National Park. In this article, Jessica Grose discovers the stark reality that a fed bear is often a dead bear — for national parks are, ultimately, a human creation: “Its boundaries are built and monitored by the government, and the rangers are responsible for keeping its … visitors safe.” If a bear gets too close, the rangers have to play judge and jury on its life.
This was the case with Grose’s subject — the Wapiti sow — a bear thought to have been responsible for two deaths in Yellowstone National Park. Grose’s piece is a harrowing look at bear attacks and how rangers weigh up a bear’s guilt like a criminal case, with “ non-acidic envelopes for storing evidence, tweezers for picking up multicolored grizzly bear hairs, tape measures for measuring bear tracks.” The death penalty is based on whether a bear was acting in a naturally aggressive way or not. But what exactly is natural? The penal code for wild animals is a hard one to decipher.
Wildlife biologists like Kerry Gunther help the park’s crime-scene investigators by speculating on a bear’s emotional state. Based on the evidence at hand, he tries to determine whether a given act of bear aggression might have been a natural behavior—the result of being startled while feeding on an elk carcass, for example, or seeing someone approaching her cubs. If a bear appears to have followed a hiker down the trail instead of backing off, or if it attacked campers while they were asleep, that would be more unusual—the result, perhaps of a deranged grizzly mind.
In a mauling case like that of John Wallace, in which there are no living (human) witnesses, sorting out these categories of bear aggression can be especially vexing. But there’s one piece of circumstantial evidence that almost always leads to euthanasia: a half-eaten corpse. Under normal circumstances, the grizzly diet in Yellowstone is about 60 percent vegetarian—roots and nuts, with the remainder coming from pocket gophers, trout, elk, and bison. If the rangers have good reason to believe that a bear killed a human being and then consumed his body, that bear’s behavior will be deemed unnatural—and its crime a capital offense.
Not all bears are given a guilty verdict after an attack. When Mya Helena Myllykoski and her son were charged by a grizzly bear, the bear received a reprieve for acting naturally to defend a moose carcass. In her interview with Eva Holland, Myllykoski describes her relief that the bear was spared, and how instead of paralyzing her with fear, the attack inspired her to fight to protect bears. Holland explores the fascinating psychology behind Myllykoski’s “post-traumatic growth,” as well as describing the attack itself in spine-tingling detail. Her account demonstrates great respect for the wilderness she is writing about — in a previous piece, “When a Fatal Grizzly Mauling Goes Viral,” Holland discusses her reluctance to report on bear attacks at all: They are incredibly rare, and she questions whether writing about them is anything more than voyeurism for those outside of bear country. This perspective brings sincerity, thoughtfulness, and understanding to her work on the subject.
When she shares that detail—that she has felt a grizzly bear’s hot breath on her face—I feel something unexpected creeping up inside me, a little green shoot alongside the larger growth of fear and fascination as I listen to her story: envy. Irrationally, against all logic or instinct for survival, I envy that experience, just a little. When she tells me that she regrets not having a memory of that smell, I understand what she means. I want to know what the bear smelled like too.
We crave vivid and authentic encounters with the wilderness. That, in part, is why we go out there, why we leave the city behind for an afternoon or a weekend, or more. We want to see the stars turn overhead and hear loons, owls, and coyotes; we want to watch the mist burn off a river’s surface, or a thunderstorm roll across a lake. We want to smell crushed spruce needles and wet, decomposing logs and that sweet dirt scent when the mushrooms begin to pop up.
Wilderness can feed us. It can fill our lives up with rich sensory memories. But we take risks in going there, and we bring risk with us for the animals that live there too. Sometimes we pay a price for our curiosity and our desires—but more often, they pay the price instead.
Timothy Treadwell took the meaning of bear advocate to a whole new level. I first learned about Treadwell through watching Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, an incredible film that uses sequences extracted from more than 100 hours of video footage shot by Treadwell during the last five years of his life — years he spent living amongst grizzly bears in Alaska. Nick Jans has also written a beautiful book about Treadwell, The Grizzly Maze, depicting the journey that led Treadwell to the bears, and the stunning, eerie landscape of Alaska that is their home.
In this excerpt for Reader’s Digest, Jans explains how Treadwell was a controversial figure, a self-styled “bear whisperer” who refused to accept bears as dangerous animals, and “gave them names like Thumper, Mr. Chocolate, and Squiggle. He would walk up to a half-ton wild animal with four-inch claws and two-inch fangs, and say, ‘Czar, I’m so worried! I can’t find little Booble.'” Jans provides a moving portrait of Treadwell, culminating in a gut-wrenching description of his final demise — mauled by a bear. Accustomed to recording his life, Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, had a camera turned on during the attack: “Treadwell did not die quickly. The tape runs roughly six minutes, and his cries can be heard two-thirds of that time.”
While many believe Treadwell encroached on the life of the bears, rendering his end inevitable, he was still a remarkable, larger-than-life character, and Jans manages to capture him with his elegant prose.
Those searching for the meaning in what happened to Timothy Treadwell offer compelling theories, impossible to either prove or refute but containing flickers of insight. Bear-viewing guide Gary Porter says, “I think Timmy made a fundamental anthropomorphic error. Naming them and hanging around with them as long as he did, he probably forgot they were bears. And maybe they forgot, some of the time, he was human.” Porter points out that old, dominant males generally avoid people and are intolerant of other bears. A subordinate bear that refuses to move is attacked and, if it doesn’t retreat, is often killed and eaten. Biologist Larry Van Daele calls such an event “apparently more of a disciplinary action than predatory.”
And he, too, agrees there may be something to the theory, especially given “the strange, ambiguous signals Timothy sent to bears.”
“Maybe that big guy figured Timmy was just another bear,” Porter suggests. If so, it was a final, ironic compliment to a man who strove, among bears, to become as much like them as possible.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our team picked and featured hundreds of in-depth investigations published across the web. Here are our top picks.
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In July 2012, U.S. Army First Lieutenant Clint Lorance gave an order that killed two Afghan civilians on a motorcycle near an operating base outside of Kandahar, in a volatile region in Afghanistan. Lorance was convicted of murder. The narrative weaved by Sean Hannity and others at Fox News framed Lorance as a war hero; he was pardoned by Donald Trump in November 2019 and served six years of a 20-year sentence. The former Army officer, who had been advised to take interviews only from conservative media outlets, agreed to talk with Nathaniel Penn, and the result is an incredibly riveting and comprehensive piece on his case.
Arriving on the dirt road that led into the village, the patrol discovered two of the three Afghan men lying beside a ditch. They were dead. Their companion had run away. Near them, the motorcycle leaned on its kickstand.
It wasn’t at all the scene Lorance had imagined. “If I would have been up there,” he told me, “and would have known that they were stopped and off their motorcycle, I would never in a million years have said, ‘Fire at them.’ I would want to go talk to them and get intel out of them. I’d be like, ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ I would want to know everything about them.”
A woman and two children stood near the bodies, weeping.
Holy shit, Lorance thought. Did we just kill good people?
The way to find out was to do a Battle Damage Assessment. Skelton was the intelligence specialist who carried the SEEK. But Lorance wanted Skelton to follow him into the village to carry out the mission and get the biometric enrollments. The engagement with the motorcycle had been necessary and unfortunate, but it wasn’t important. He ordered two of his men to conduct the Battle Damage Assessment while he proceeded into the village. They had the necessary training, even if they didn’t have the SEEK. They knelt by the bodies.
Captain Swanson, who had been alerted to the situation, was radioing Lorance from headquarters. What was happening? he asked. Were the dead men combatants or civilians? Had Lorance done the Battle Damage Assessment?
No, Lieutenant Lorance replied, they hadn’t been able to do the Battle Damage Assessment. The villagers had taken away the bodies.
As he spoke, he knew he had just made a critical mistake. He should have said that his men would get to the Battle Damage Assessment eventually, that they didn’t have time to do that shit right now. Because when you speak over the radio, “you might as well be putting your hand on the Bible,” as one member of the platoon told me.
In the years to come, Lorance’s decision not to use the SEEK device for the Battle Damage Assessment would prove to be crucial and polarizing. It would contribute both to his imprisonment and his pardon.
The weeping woman was screaming now. Lorance told himself that her tears didn’t necessarily mean he’d done anything wrong. The men whose bodies she was crying over could be insurgents. That shocked him — the idea that the Taliban had families, too. It had never occurred to him before.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. We’ve searched through our archives to find the science and nature stories that take you into ancient forests, through dark swamps, to the bottom of the sea, and right up into the stars.
If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly Top 5 email every Friday.
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Old-growth forests in North America are like something out of a fairytale — huge trees, luminescent with moss, with boughs arching above your head, and “gnarled roots” beneath your feet, “dicing in and out of the soil like sea serpents.” And, as Ferris Jabr discovers in this story, the magic of these trees goes beyond what we see — with intricate fungal networks weaving them together into an inclusive community that links “nearly every tree in a forest — even trees of different species.” This is a fascinating piece that shows you these giant sentinels are more than you expect — more than just individuals.
Jabr goes into the forest with Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia who has studied these systems and proved “a dynamic exchange of resources through mycorrhizal networks” between the two species of paper birch and Douglas fir. Her work has provoked a certain amount of controversy: “Since Darwin, biologists have emphasized the perspective of the individual … the single-minded ambitions of selfish genes.” Simard is proving this is not what is happening in old-growth forests; they are “neither an assemblage of stoic organisms tolerating one another’s presence nor a merciless battle royale: It’s a vast, ancient and intricate society.” And trees are not just interacting with each other, “trees sense nearby plants and animals and alter their behavior accordingly: The gnashing mandibles of an insect might prompt the production of chemical defenses … Some studies have even suggested that plant roots grow toward the sound of running water.”
A forest operating as a complicated, sharing society is a powerful notion. Not only does it garner more respect for this ecosystem, but it could prove that cooperation is as central to evolution as competition: “Wherever living things emerge, they find one another, mingle and meld.” Read more…
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