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Cut From the Same Cloth

All illustrations by Myfanwy Tristram

Myfanwy Tristram | Longreads | September 2019 | 14 minutes (3,863 words)

 

A clatter at the door. A small package plops through our letterbox.

It’s come a long way. I can see that by the sticky labels, foreign postmarks, and scrawled scripts of postal workers around the world.

I text my daughter: 'Your wig has arrived from Japan.' After a moment, I text again: 'A phrase I never thought I’d find myself typing.'

This was never in the parenting manual.

But back to the housework.

I enter my bedroom to find the area around the mirror overrun with her makeup, her dirty laundry in pools on the floor. That girl leaves a trail of destruction.

Admittedly, this is not a remarkable complaint for any mother of a teen. Where mine differs from the grumbles of parents through the ages is that among the detritus to be picked up and put away are:

Wig caps, tossed aside and draped wherever they may land

fake eyelashes, like furry caterpillars on the bathroom sink

and the endless, infuriating, discarded colored Band-Aids that I seem to find everywhere - stuck to my work clothes, on the soles of my shoes, under the sofa... even deep in my own bed

This last year has been a revelation as my daughter blossoms into her own, rather extreme, sense of style. Liberated from parental tastes by pocket money and cash earned from neighborhood dog walking, she trawls the thrift shops and returns home triumphant with unusual clothing. She’s 14. Still in need of parental comfort, food, finances, but beginning the process of becoming her own standalone self. And what a self it is.

She’s pushing her school’s uniform rules to the limits. "Light" makeup is permitted... but here we have bright red eyeshadow and black lips. Skirt rolled up to be as short as possible. Shoes must be black. Fortunately, Doc Martens are black..once you've gone over the stitching with a Sharpie. Clip-on horns - well, hair clips are allowed. Hair has to be a "natural" color so she dyed it jet black. First day of the hols and out came the bleach and crazy color. The blazer is compulsory, but stays scrunched up in the backpack until she's in the school gates. Tights with "accidental" ripped holes [Close up on eye and nose] Band-Aid "Bean brow" - half shaved off Stickers or painted motifs Tip of the nose colored red (quite cute)

Trouble is...I can’t really complain, because at age 14, I was also breaking the school rules.

In fact, when regarding my wayward, outrageously dressed girl, I find myself experiencing a peculiar combination of pride and envy.

Both may be a sin, but pride in one’s child is an acceptable part of parenthood.

Envy, while recognized in psychology and culture, most certainly isn’t.

Fine: I’m proud of this fierce individual that appears to have inherited my own peacock inclinations. Not so fine: I find myself envious that she has a period of wild experimentation ahead of her — and a figure that means she fits into pretty much every thrift store find.

So, uncomfortable with this disagreeable feeling, and at risk of falling into the parental cliché of “you’re not going out dressed like that!” I realize that there’s just one thing to do. I need to try and understand more about where the crazy looks are coming from. Instead of sighing heavily at the mess and fruitlessly asking, once again, for her to just try and keep it in check, I sit down and ask her to give me a beginner’s guide to her style. She is delighted to assist.

Her influences come from the internet, from fast-spreading pictures on Instagram, from crazy hairstyles on TikTok. Teens’ fashion inspiration is now global, grassroots led, with the commercial interests falling over themselves to catch up.

We scroll through her favorite accounts, and I meet the strangers whose fashion tips and product endorsements indirectly result in those Band-Aids in my bed:

@ohbowie 562K followers, @yung_bishop 65.5K followers, @vrisknya 21.1K followers, @Rosemaryonette 70.8K followers, @artsydoodle 38K followers, @Safiya Nygaard 8.1M subscribers, @Punker_irl 1.1M followers, @Piaisevil 508K followers (Follower counts increasing by the day.)

These vloggers and Instagrammers, familiar friendly faces to their subscribers, set the fashion. All of them are from the U.K. or U.S., but they have something in common — they’re all looking to Japan.

I understand the appeal. I myself was responsible for introducing her to Japanese culture in toddlerhood, as we shared our enjoyment of Studio Ghibli and the adorable magic realism of Totoro and Ponyo.

Next came a wider exploration of anime and manga. She and her schoolmates swapped tips and learned from YouTubers who filmed themselves playing games like Doki Doki Literature Club and Danganronpa.

Then it was cosplay, the art of dressing like one’s favorite characters, whether with painstaking DIY costumery, or by buying outfits online, ready-made, from the Chinese kitchen table industries wise enough to surf the wave of this crazy fad as it hit the West — and able to do so thanks to global capitalism and the world wide web.

My daughter’s childhood environmental beliefs, despite my entreaties, were swept away. Her carbon footprint is forgotten in the desire to summon just the right hair clips or wig from the other side of the world.

Because then came the call of Harajuku. And that was just too strong to resist.

HARAJUKU (also in Japanese)

Since the 1980s, Japanese teens have flocked to this area of Tokyo to buy, and show off, their extreme fashions. It began with Rockabilly enthusiasts who came to dance, with music, moves, and outfits taken wholesale — ironically — from the West. Back then, fashion influences traveled in the other direction.

And then one day, as Shoichi Aoki, editor of the street photography magazine Fruits notes, something new emerged. Art school students, and girls in particular, were leaving behind the monochrome outfits that had previously been their norm. Now they were displaying a grassroots style that was completely unprecedented: yellow hair, platform shoes, ultra-bright color combos, and exciting, crazy mismatched clothing.

Thirty years on, the area of Harajuku has been taken over by big, multinational high-street stores, and true inventiveness is now to be found in its backstreets, Ura-Harajuku. But that hasn’t remotely dented its popularity abroad — which explains a lot about the state of my bedroom floor.

As with any long-lived subculture, Harajuku fashion has split into different genres, all of which my daughter explains to me with far more passion that she’ll ever apply to her school lessons:

Lolita Girls leads to Gothic Lolita or Kodona. Harajuku kimono style. Decora, has some things in common with Fairy kei. Yami kawaii ('sick cute'), not to be confused with Yume kawaii ('dream cute').

As I learn of these styles, I understand so much more. It’s exciting to see my daughter with all these creative possibilities before her: the opportunity to take what she likes, mix and match, and add a little something to make it her own. And it’s something I recognize very well.

In the ’80s, while Harajuku style was in its infancy, over here in the U.K. I was a teen myself, entirely oblivious of Japanese culture.

In the West, our pop scene was setting the high-street fashion:

Even the heartthrobs on the posters all over your 11-year-old niece’s bedroom, like Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet, were dressed in New Romantic style: billowing sleeves, flamboyant hair, lush satins and scarves, cravats, beads, and baubles. The look was inspired by the English Romantics of the 19th century: Byron, Shelley, etc, but these were the new romantics with access to the modern benefits of hairspray and crimpers. They expressed themselves through opulent clothes, accessories, hair, and makeup -- men just as much as women. They described themselves as hedonistic. Tutting dads called them 'poseurs' ... and worse.

But this was the mainstream. And if there’s any doubt about that, you only have to look at Lady Diana’s wedding dress: taffeta, lace, and enormous puffy sleeves. Definitively new romantic -- and you don’t get more 'establishment' than the royal family.

If the mainstream figures are already dressing in quite extreme fashions, those who want to show that they are different have to find another way to dress, different music to listen to, new ways to scandalize the elderly neighbors.

And here in the West, the various movements of the ’70s evolved, in the ’80s, into their own divided, intertwined subcultures. New romantic grew from glam rock, was shaped by the rise of the synth, and its forerunners paraded their outré looks at London’s Blitz and Wag nightclubs. This was the look that the high-street shops decided to mass-produce, and it was quite the norm to see big kitten bows, taffeta silks, and pearl necklaces on even the squarest kids. This was the default look by the time I was developing an interest in clothes.

The recipe for New Romantic: Glam rock. Add synths. Incubate in nightclubs.

Not far behind, goth was evolving from ’70s punk and post-punk, and also discovered the possibilities of electronic music machines. Its devotees favored the seminal Batcave club.

The recipe for Goth: 70s punk rock. Add a sprinkling of synth and drum machines. Leads to post-punk and new wave. Incubate in nightclub.

Now this was more like it. Far from the big city, in rural Devon in southwest England, my only option was to read of this from afar — in The Face, i-D, and Smash Hits magazines. Yet the minute I saw the goth bands, I knew that I had found my own look. It would help me express that I was different. Special. That I rejected the dull blandness of everyday life.

That spark in my daughter’s eye when she sees a new Harajuku look? This was the same impulse.

But for me, there was no internet, of course. No handy websites to allow me to piece together a goth look and pay for it in one go at checkout. Our looks were far more thrown together, with a mixture of ingenuity and serendipity.

Figure 1: Hair: dyed (usually black), crimped, backcombed and hairsprayed. A-line skirt, dyed in a bucket, then split down the side seam...all the better to display leggings, also split down the side seam, then laced with ribbon. If you're really lucky, you might find an Adam Ant style jacket in the antique shop. Bullet belt from the army surplus shop. We sent off for pixie boots through mail order - the more buckles the better. Figure 2: Silk scarf tied to belt loop, dad's suit trousers, Chinese slippers from the martial arts studio, studded belt, Batwing spider web knit. Figure 3: A leather jacket was the thrift shop holy grail. Once you had one, you could paint your favorite band's name on the back. Old felt hat from your gran. Get your mum to knit you a stripy mohair sweater. Doc Martens were still mainly work boots. Figure 4: Ballgown from a jumble sale. Sew the skirt hem to the waistband to make a puffball. Fishnet tights could be repurposed as sleeves. Armfuls of silver bracelets. Stripy tights.

Time passes. And now: Here I am at 50, my daughter 14.

At her age, it is fairly straightforward to dress differently, always assuming you can dodge the wrath of your school; but that’s far in the past for me.

Growing up and taking new roles, new responsibilities, means making decisions about how you present yourself. It boils down to this: Do you want to be the goth at the school gate? The outsider at that job interview?

My body has changed, too. Sagging flesh and a growing waistline have made me less inclined to let my clothes shout “look at me!” lest folk shout back, “We’ve looked, and we find you displeasing.”

I work from home: There’s little need and less time to spend hours on my hair or makeup. At the same time, I find it hard to give up the idea of dressing to display a sense of self.

Should I have stayed faithful to my gothic roots? It’s not unknown: You do see the occasional goth family with a pushchair and a kid in a Bauhaus onesie.

Fair play to them: Dealing with an infant and getting your look together each day — that can’t be easy. Myself? As a woman who came to motherhood relatively late in life, I had already set aside my more outrageous costumery as I navigated the first steps of a career in conservative office workplaces.

I graduated from the backcombed hair. I even spend good money at salons these days. My trousers have no rips. I’ve conformed — and find myself looking for other ways to express myself.

Meanwhile, age plays a part. As you enter the second half of life, it’s easy to feel that you’re not supposed to stand out. Just as you’re not supposed to show too much leg, or cleavage, it’s all part of the process of desexualization that the older woman is generally expected, in our society at least, to go through.

Because I had my daughter later in life — at age 36 — her blooming into a gorgeous, expressive experimental teenager has hit right at the same time as I’m staring into the barrel of menopause, and the attendant signs of aging that have traditionally been seen as unattractive. Let us not digress too far into the patriarchal belief that aging men become more attractive, while women must fight against white hair, wrinkles, and bingo wings.

After all, men face their challenges too. Aging male goths might have to contend with the loss of their teen pride and joy, the mane of hair — its decline hopefully not exacerbated by the crimpers and hairspray — and, like music journalist Simon Price, find more creative ways of still keeping the look alive.

The Simon Price approach to male pattern baldness

Things just aren’t as clear as they were when I could take a sample from the goth rulebook, and anything went so long as it was black.

These days, one has to try and express individuality with style, maybe a soupçon of quirkiness. But not too much — that can be unbecoming for women of a certain age.

The acceptable face of middle age: Quirky glasses (to show character). Interesting print (please don't write me off). 'Forgiving' cut: loose over the tum. Upper arms covered.

There’s no one more finely attuned to this than a teen regarding a parent: My husband was recently told, in no uncertain terms, that his striped rainbow T-shirt — colorful but well within the bounds of respectability to my eyes — was too embarrassing for my daughter to be seen beside.

She herself was dressed, that day, in full Harajuku style.

In 1945 psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, a colleague of Sigmund Freud, painted a very gloomy picture of menopause as a “gradual loss of femininity,” claiming that:

Speech balloon: 'Mastering the psychologic reactions to the organic decline is one of the most difficult tasks of a woman's life.'

At the time, she was 61 years old herself.

She had my attention: After all, the “organic decline” is just around the corner for me. Phrased like that, it sounds like a barrel of laughs.

So on I read … and found something that struck rather an unwelcome chord. Psychologist Terri Apter interprets Deutsch’s theories like this: “Women observe a daughter’s adolescent bloom as a sign of their own decline. In middle age, a woman is pushed out of the sexual limelight, and as she sees her daughter achieve the first blush of maturity, she grows envious.”

Whew — that was a bit too close to home.

But is this inevitable? Deutsch was writing in far more patriarchal times, when a woman was far more likely to be seen primarily as a wife and mother, and to have lost all purpose when those functions were no longer needed.

Let’s turn to today’s sociologists. I was delighted to come across the words of Julia Twigg, who studies embodiment and age, pointing out that our judgment of the aging woman is something decided by society itself:

There are rules in later years around what’s appropriate - and by and large that’s defined in terms of what’s not appropriate. It’s a set of rules about what you shouldn’t be wearing, such as a “short skirt”, a “low neck”, an “over-sexy dress” for women. Some of those changes in dress are about actual physiological change - as we get older as women, busts get larger and lower, and our waists become less sleek. So if you’re designing clothes for an older woman, you need to change your cut slightly to make them flattering and make them fit. That’s an example of responding to real changes - but responding by pushing the neckline high, covering up with sleeves and things like that are responses to cultural valuations and judgments that say that the only flesh that should be visible in society is that which is young.

That academics are pointing out the negative attitudes we have toward aging, and especially in women, is one sign of change. It also means that we can push against it if we don’t like it.

But older women also have another source of hope. Just as the internet is inspiring our children, it also lays out an alternative path for aging a little less gracefully.

A remarkable roster of role models has arisen, showing that there is no need for the older woman to succumb to societal pressure to fade into the background. In fact, these ladies do quite the opposite. Ari Seth Cohen’s photographs collected in the book and associated blog Advanced Style celebrate their exuberance. Some have risen to fame. Some were famous already for achievements in their field, and have declined to retire gracefully.

Deutsch might have dismissed these women thus:

Speech balloon: Modern fashions and cosmetics help the ageing woman to behave like a girl in puberty. Narcissistic self delusion makes her painted face appear youthful to her in the mirror.'

But they refer to themselves quite differently:

Iris Apfel, born 1921: The way I dress may be ‘different’ or ‘eccentric’ to some who feel the need to label, but that’s of no concern to me. I don’t dress to be stared at; I dress for myself. There’s nothing wrong with wrinkles. When you’re older, trying to look years younger is foolish, and you’re not fooling anyone. Fronted a MAC cosmetics advertising campaign -- age 90. Ilona Royce Smithkin, born 1920, artist. I had no feeling of aging. It’s always just been another day. Zandra Rhodes, fashion designer, known for her bright pink hair: I am tired of good taste. I want to do everything wrong. Dame Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer, born 1941. I don't notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and then they do, and they are usually 70. Her early designs set the 'pirate' look for the New Romantics. Anna Piaggi, born 1931, Italian fashion journalist and muse to Karl Lagerfield. What is to be avoided at all costs is the twinset look.

So … there’s another option. A whole new subculture to explore. The subculture of the older, expressive, break-all-the-rules women.

Shall I try to out-outrageous my daughter?

For all I say I’m envious of my daughter’s freedoms, perhaps the older woman has more leeway, more agency.

My daughter still has to navigate the competing demands of her parents entreating her not to wear outfits that will show her knickers when she bends over, while learning, and assessing the legitimacy, of the anti slut-shaming movement.

At this moment in time she’s pulled between school’s rules on how she’s allowed to present herself, and her desire to be like the extreme dressers she sees on Instagram.

Then there’s a tension between the endless bounty to be found in thrift shops, and the limitations of restricted storage space and the frustrations that explode from me when she brings “just one more top” into the house.

I’m glad I’ve poked and prodded at this ugly feeling of jealousy and come to understand exactly where it’s come from — and that there are options other than sinking into a societally approved sea of beige.

Gaining a deeper understanding of the styles and influences that set my daughter alight has made me far more understanding about those stray fake eyelashes I keep finding around the house.

I won’t forget my own forays into extreme fashion. They may even make me, temporarily, a more favored parent: I can pass tips on about hair crimping and experimenting with scissors, stencils, and sewing machines.

While recognizing that squicking out people my age is part of the point, I’ll try to curb any harmful excesses on her part, like tattoos and tongue splitting, at least until she reaches adulthood.

And meanwhile, I’ll continue to tread my own line, expressing myself without embarrassing her during this sensitive teenage period. Since we’re in and out of charity shops so much, who knows what I’ll find in the larger sizes while she flits through the tiny ones?

For all my struggles with expressing myself, it feels like I’ll never be ready to give it up.

And the real answer is — of course — to find the joy in it all, both as a mum, and as a woman.

Reader, I dyed my hair purple

Thanks
To my daughter, for sharing her fashion knowledge.
To Professor Janet Sayers, for helping track down Helen Deutsch quotes.

* * *

Myfanwy Tristram is an illustrator with a special interest in graphic memoir. She lives in Brighton on the south coast of England, and has been recording her life through the medium of comic strips since the Eighties.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Art Director: Katie Kosma

This Month in Books: ‘I Don’t Want To Become a Giant Insect!’

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Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter is a bodily affair. In an interview with Laura Barcella about her new book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, Sady Doyle discusses the body horror of womanhood: “reproductive horrors,” of course, and “the horror of being in a body so heavily controlled, penalized, and stigmatized,” naturally, but also the horror of violence against women; the grim spectacle of dead American wives piling up like soldiers:

I return over and over to the metaphor of war. We’re allowed to say that war is hell, but what does it mean when we lose fewer U.S. soldiers between 2000 and 2012 than women killed by their own husbands?

Whereas in her interview with Jonny Auping about Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe presents an inverted vision of dead women: “so many of the murders that we consume in media — the murders that make up the bulk of our cultural imagination — are with female victims,” she says. However,

I ask people, “What percentage of murder is a male perpetrator and a female victim?” People invariably say 70 percent or 80 percent. It’s actually 25 percent. That’s shocking to a lot of people because so many of the murders that we consume in media…are with female victims.

Seen through this prism, our obsession with female death is politically out of joint. But that’s exactly Monroe’s point: women’s deaths — a specific kind of young, white woman’s death, that is — are depoliticized, and thus more easily consumable as media. Which actually does end up tying in neatly to Doyle’s thinking; in Dead Blondes, she analyzes how women are made monstrous in the cultural imagination — specifically she focuses on horror films — because of all the monstrous things that are done to them in real life. This kind of state of exception that swirls around the subject of women and death, in both authors’ view, seems to breed a unique sort of narrative monstrosity that bleeds back into real life. In fact, Monroe’s book, rather than focusing on horror films, centers around four women who have developed an obsessive relationship with true crime and murder.


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Bodies, of course, don’t just belong to the dead. In her review of two recent novels — Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy — Morgan Jerkins writes, regarding the mother and son at the center of Vuong’s novel, that “survival, the physical endurance of their bodies, is what binds them no matter where their family settles.” The body becomes a very particular site of meaning for young people affected by migration and displacement — and for the literature of migration:

Survival is a steady theme throughout immigrant literature, but what is most striking in Vuong and Dennis-Benn’s work is that they concentrate on the intimacy of their subjects without bombarding the reader with cold and calcified historical detail; instead, we learn about their countries’ histories — and about the consequences of the characters’ movement across vast spaces — through the living, breathing reality of the protagonists’ bodies.

And not all bodies are the same. There are sick bodies and bodies with disabilities, both of which require their inhabitants to navigate different landscapes than the ones encountered by healthy or abled people. Anne Boyer talks about being a body circulated through space by the logic of cancer capitalism in an excerpt from her memoir-in-essays The Undying; Keah Brown talks about her committed loving relationships (and brief flings) with the chairs in her life in an essay from The Pretty One; and in an interview with Naomi Elias about her memoir I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying, Bassey Ikpi describes the different approach she had to take to writing about her memories since Bipolar II had affected how she experienced own life: there were periods where “I just didn’t feel connected to myself, where I didn’t feel like I was in my own body.”

In all this body-talk, I can’t believe I haven’t even touched yet on Erik Davis’ High Weirdness! It’s a deep dive into the strange experiences of the psychonauts — those fabled far-out white guys of the early seventies who took a lot of drugs, got into the occult, and connected with a higher being. As Terrence McKenna wrote regarding an incident involving his brother Dennis during the famous Experiment at La Chorrera,

Dennis gave forth, for a few seconds, a very machine-like, loud, dry buzz, during which his body became stiff. After a moment’s silence, he broke into a frightened series of excited questions. “What happened?” and, most memorably, “I don’t want to become a giant insect!”

There are all types of bodies to inhabit in the world: sick and ill, placed and displaced, about to turn into an insect or not, etc. May you and your body go on to read many good books this month!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Tramp Like Us

Photo by Alia Smith, courtesy of the author / Little, Brown and Company

Dan Kois | excerpted from How to Be a Family | Little, Brown and Company | September 2019 | 24 minutes (6,373 words)

 

“Is there a way I could chaperone,” I asked my daughter’s teacher, “that doesn’t include snorkeling in freezing-cold water?”

We were in New Zealand to learn how the lives of Kiwi families differed from our own east coast suburban bubble. One way, it turned out, was that my 9-year-old was taking a school field trip to snorkel in the little bay by our house in Wellington. It was an example of EOTC, education outside the classroom, a crucial part of Kiwi schooling, ranging from day trips like this to secondary-school tramps across the Tongoriro Alpine Crossing.

When I’d volunteered to chaperone, I hadn’t known that chaperones were expected to bring their own wet suits in order to get in the water with the kids. Now, I like snorkeling, but the very idea of owning my own wet suit was patently absurd. So that’s why I asked if there was some other way I could help.

“On the snorkeling trip?” she replied dubiously. “Errr . . . we do need a few people to stand at the shore keeping an eye on everyone. Perhaps you could do that?”
Read more…

It Comes in Waves

Illustration by Matt Huhnh

Lilly Dancyger | Longreads | September 2019 | 11 minutes (2,790 words)

I never met Swedish journalist Kim Wall, but a few months after her mutilated torso was found in 2017, I dreamt that I’d been the last person to see her alive. The torso, riddled with stab wounds, washed up 11 days after she’d boarded a submarine belonging to Danish inventor Peter Madsen, to interview him for a story. In part of the dream, I saw myself on security footage, running, frantic, trying to find someone to tell what I knew about where she was in those 11 days she was missing, before she was officially one more murdered woman in the news. I woke up like coming up from an ice bath, gasping, eyes watering, still feeling a crushing guilt for letting her get on the submarine in the first place; for not somehow knowing what was going to happen, and stopping it.

When my cousin Sabina was murdered in 2010, I called the detectives handling the case to tell them about the dramatic break-up she’d recently been through, to say I didn’t know anything for sure but they might want to talk to her ex. She was popular in the club scene in Philadelphia, a budding model whose gigantic smile and fluttering eyelashes surely inspired some jealousy. I didn’t know all of the social dynamics of her world, but I told the detectives everything I could think of that she’d told me. I ran through possible scenarios of advances rebuffed, territories infringed upon, of elaborate grudges and plots. I terrified myself with thoughts of what petty trifle someone had decided was worth such a glowing 20-year-old’s life. People have murdered for the most insignificant things, and I wondered if I’d spend the rest of my life saying “over a guy” or “over a modeling job.”

I couldn’t face the idea that I would never see her again, so instead I focused on what I could do to help catch whoever did this; and what I maybe could have done, should have done, to prevent it from happening in the first place.

I was in another state when she was killed, but I wanted so badly to go back and walk Sabina home that night. The guilt of the inability to time-travel. Six months before she died, she posted a photo on Facebook from when she was about 2 and I was about 3, of me hugging her protectively while she leaned into me. She captioned it “you may have had a big sis, to protect you, but I had my big cus, and that was all I needed!” I pull it up periodically to torture myself.
Read more…

What’s Happening to My Body?

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Devorah Heitner | Longreads | September 2019 | 15 minutes (3,869 words)

My mother always said she had thunder thighs. On one visit home, I found a picture of little Cindy at about age 10, long before she was my mother. In the picture, her thighs, solid like mine, are turned outward, in first position. I studied the picture, noting how the blue costume cast a pallor on her pale skin. Her arms made an oval above her head. Her brown eyes looked big and nervous. She was not smiling. Maybe all the girls took ballet in the ’50s, in Little Neck, Long Island. The picture doesn’t give the impression that she was begging to do this.

The huge breasts that would later try to kill her hadn’t emerged yet. Just a small rise underneath her leotard. Holding the photo made me recall the sensation of my own breasts budding, stretching me from the inside, my nipples constantly sore, and rubbing, and wrong.
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‘To Be Polite By Ignoring the Obvious’: Jess Row on Unpacking Whiteness in Literature

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Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,662 words)

Despite the recurring cycle of conversations on topics such as the need for fully-funded MFA programs, the financial challenges of sustaining oneself as a writer, and the lack of diversity in all levels of media, the issue of whiteness in publishing — and the privileges that come with being white in publishing — continues to justify our scrutiny. We are aware that white people hold much of the power in the literary world, but how do we assess this fact critically, understanding that whiteness is not just a factor in the economics of writing, but in the writing itself? Novelist Jess Row investigates this question in his latest book, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. In his own words, “American culture has evolved a theory of the white psyche that rarely, if ever, considers racism as a direct or even proximate cause of its disorder and distress.” Read more…

My Love Affair with Chairs

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Keah Brown | An excerpt adapted from The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me | Atria Books | 2019 | 17 minutes (4,556 words)

 

My longest relationship has been with chairs. We are very happy together, committed and strong, in sickness and health till death do us part, etc. There are arguments and disagreements as in any other relationship, but we apologize and make up before nightfall so we don’t go to bed angry. The notion of love at first sight is a little cheesy but true. Chairs and I have traveled around the world and back again. We cuddled on the beach in Puerto Rico, shared stolen glances in the Virgin Islands, danced the night away in Grand Turk, and gave some major PDA in the Bahamas. My chairs are loyal, with vastly different personalities but an equal amount of appreciation for the butt of mine that sits in them. A few of them like to play it cool: they don’t want me to think that they care as much as they do, and I let them believe that it’s working. After all, sometimes you have to let your partner think they have the upper hand, to work toward the long game of the bigger thing you want later. However, you and I, dear reader, we know the truth. The chairs in my life love me, and I honestly can’t blame them. Read more…

Prayers to Lucia

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Heather Quinn| Longreads | September 2019 | 21 minutes (5,102 words)

 

Obtain for me, by your intercession with God, perfect vision for my bodily eyes, and the grace to use them for God’s greater honor and glory and the salvation of souls.
— Prayer to Santa Lucia

Santa Lucia holds her left arm outstretched, a silver platter balanced on the palm of her hand. On the platter rests a disembodied pair of eyes. They are looking, lidded, expressive. What they seem to express, in their straight-ahead gaze, is serenity and knowing, a kind of Mona Lisa without a face. In some images Santa Lucia holds the eyes in her hand directly, without a platter to rest on, with a sort of branch that connects them both like fruit on a tiny tree. I think of optic nerves connected directly — without the brain as intermediary — to the spinal cord. Sight talking to body, vision sent from nerves straight to muscle, a physical and tangible thing.

These are Lucia’s own eyes, though she gazes out from the picture with an identical pair of her own, safe in their sockets. They were gouged out while she was alive, then restored to her after her death.

Lucia is the patron saint of eye diseases, blindness, writers, stained glass makers, the poor, and sore throats. Her name means light and her feast day is attended by young girls in red-and-white gowns with crowns of candles upon their heads.
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After Three Children, Reclaiming My Body and My Mind

Illustration by Tiffany Baker

Ukamaka Olisakwe | Longreads | September 2019 | 22 minutes (5,546 words)

Nurse Ruth’s face was set in tense lines of seriousness as she probed my cervix with a metal instrument. I knew this procedure by heart, having been through it five times in the past 17 years: dilate the cervix, measure the uterine cavity, insert the intrauterine device.

But Ruth was frowning. The last time, another nurse said the depth of my uterine cavity was too short. Twelve years ago, after the birth of my third child, I learned that my retroverted uterus had yet to properly settle itself nicely inside my pelvis and that my cervix had partially descended into my vagina.

Now as Ruth brought out the instrument and gazed at the blood smear on the tip, I trained my eyes on the crumple of her brow and tried to decipher what she wasn’t saying. In another life, I would not set my foot within a 10-mile radius of this place. But here I was, 36 and frightened, and I willing her to say something positive; I willed her to say that childbirth hadn’t ruined me that much.

But she didn’t say those words. Instead, she worked until I could no longer endure the discomfort of metal scraping against the soft of my womb. Because my cavity was still so short, Ruth suggested an alternative contraceptive — a progestin implant. She feared my uterus would expel an IUD if she went ahead and inserted it.

True, the last IUD had snapped and poked at my insides all night until the following morning when I found a doctor, who pried open my cervix and got it out. The one before that, my body began to act strangely and I experienced unexplainable vaginal bleeding whenever sex was vigorous.

“I have heard terrible things about the implant,” I told Ruth. “I hear it can reduce me to the biblical woman with the issue of bleeding who was healed by Jesus.” She laughed, despite the seriousness of the moment, but then she had positive and convincing things to say. She invited me to the clinic’s family planning seminar scheduled for that week. She gave me an emergency oral contraceptive for the time being, and we agreed to have the contraceptive inserted into my arm at my next visit.

I smiled and thanked her. Then I cried all the way home, ignoring the curious looks of concerned passersby, some of whom paused, as Nigerians are wont to do, to ask what made me cry.
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Hot for Teacher

Getty / McSweeney's Publishing

Courtney Zoffness | Longreads | Excerpted from Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,795 words)

What did they want? More than anything? Violent things. Unattainable things.

More than anything, she wanted to taste blood, said one student.

More than anything, he wanted freedom, said another.

Your characters need to have desires, I’d explained in the previous class. Drama arises when people struggle to get what they want.

Their first writing assignment of the semester at this midsize East Coast college: compose a short fictional sketch that begins with wanting. Compelling, complex fiction, I’d said, grows out of desires great and small. Their opening sentences offered proof.

More than anything, she wanted a baby.

More than anything, he wanted things to return to the way they were.

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