The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Katherina Grace Thomas, James Lasdun, Kyle Chayka, Tay Wiles, and Buzz Bissinger.
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This week, we’re sharing stories from Katherina Grace Thomas, James Lasdun, Kyle Chayka, Tay Wiles, and Buzz Bissinger.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Anya Groner | Longreads | June 2017 | 20 minutes (5,065 words)
I’m stopped at a red light in Twinsburg, Ohio, when I spot my first pair riding in the Jeep behind me. Matching blond hair, bug-eye sunglasses, and pink chins fill the rearview mirror of my rental car. I glance and glance again before texting my sister. “It’s begun,” I type. “They’re here and you’re not.” I erase the last three words and press send. No point in guilting her for a decision she can’t reverse.
When the light turns green, I press the gas, heading to the local high school where a wiener picnic and silent auction will kick-off the 41st annual Twins Days festival. An identical twin myself, I’ll be eating my hot dog alone tonight. My sister, a marine biologist, has opted not to join me, instead signing up for a dive certification class the same weekend. Though she apologized for the timing, she didn’t offer to reschedule. Twins Days doesn’t interest her much.
I’m not sure what to expect or even why I’ve decided to come. The website tells me the three-day fete is patriotic and sweet, a massive show-and-tell where the attendees are also the main attraction. Last year, 2,053 sets of twins, triplets, and quads journeyed here from as far away as South Korea and Australia. The revelry includes competitive cornhole, look-alike and un-lookalike contests, talent shows, and a research plaza where scientists collect data from volunteers. My surface excuse for flying out is that I’m a writer, trying my hand at journalism, but even a rookie like me knows the event is far too personal for objectivity. I’ve known about the fest for as long as I can remember, and for most of those years I wouldn’t even consider attending. Lying on stacked bunks in our childhood bedroom well before our age reached double digits, my sister and I put Twins Days somewhere on the continuum between obnoxious and offensive, a gathering of voyeurs looking to celebrate sameness, the facet of our identity that frustrated us most. The best parts of twinhood we knew to be exclusive, shaped by our two unique personalities, shareable only with each other. For us, the festival held no appeal.

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | May 2017 | 15 minutes (3,743 words)
Meg first appeared to me as a nimbus of curly red hair, looming above my top bunk late at night. The hair, backlit and aglow, was so remarkable that I reached up and patted it as though it were a rare creature. Meg offered the nervous, extra-buoyant “hi” of the girlfriend meeting the boyfriend’s kid for the first time. In reply, I stroked the hair.
I was five; she was 25. Just a few weeks before, she had met my dad at an art opening. He was up-front about the fact that he was 37, divorced, with a 15-year-old and a five-year-old. She was working the second shift at a hospital, reading dense Buddhist texts, hanging out with a band of artists whose blue velvet berets and psychedelic hand-stenciled trunks would later color our house. They met in February and married in October. The ceremony was in the backyard of our old brick house near downtown Cincinnati. There was carrot cake, a smoldering fall sunset, an exchange of vows inspired by a California guru. Meg walked down the aisle to the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place.” In November of the following year, my brother Jackson was born.
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Moonlight tells the story of Chiron, a beautiful black boy coming of age in a dreadfully under-resourced section of Miami. As with any great work of art, it’s the tiniest details that reveal the most — the inflection of a phrase, the subtlety of a glance, the seconds of silence. Adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, with cinematography so lush, the balmy humidity of south Florida oozes off the screen, Moonlight is filled with moments like this. It happens when young Chiron avoids eye contact with a drug dealer during their first encounter, and again when Chiron welcomes an unexpected friendship on the soccer field with clear hesitation. You can see it every time Chiron flinches at his mother, and in the need that remains in the shadows of his eyes when he does. It happens when his mother makes Chiron read books instead of watching TV. “Find something for you to read,” she says.
The first time I saw Moonlight, these small revelations of humanity disarmed me. I felt exposed, and had to turn away from the screen. How did the filmmakers know, I wondered, that growing up black could be so contoured with dark peril, so layered with pure, sweet joy? That yes, absolutely, a drug dealer could be a respite, a much needed stand-in for a father? I realized its novelty is due in large part to the sheer, sad fact that it is rare to see black characters coming of age on screen. Two thirds of the movie is dedicated to Chiron’s childhood and adolescence; we see his intelligence and sensitivity unfurl, retreat, and finally unfurl again.

At Guernica, Maria Browning reflects on the fact that while Alzheimer’s Disease has stolen her mother’s memory, it has also relieved her mother of the torments and disappointments of her past — something that Browning is unable to forget.
My mother is both child and madwoman, all the time. She doesn’t know what day it is, or what she did one minute ago, or even the names of the few friends who still call or stop by to visit. She gets angry at the trees for dropping their leaves in autumn and can no longer understand why it’s a bad idea to share her chocolate bar with the dog. Dementia has wiped out most of her past, leaving behind a shell of personality that exists in a perpetual, baffling present.
The loss of memory is so awful a prospect, yet memory is, at best, a mixed blessing. It’s a source of torment as often as pleasure, the place where pain and loss reside. Grudges live there, and so do shame and regret. My mother, as far as I can see, is relieved of all those things. The deprivations of her childhood, her difficult marriage, the baby she lost, her thwarted dream of a singing career—all gone now. No memory means no grieving. And yet, there is still that disquiet behind her smile. There remains some unbeautiful mystery in the place she now dwells, something bad that is unknowable to me, unnameable to her.
I keep running up against that something whenever I try to find comfort in my mother’s liberation from her past. It’s so tempting to deny the darkness I see in her, to choose to believe she’s entirely happy, and I’m not sure whether that’s for her sake or mine. Even when I was a little girl battling with her over the dolls, I desperately wanted her to be happy. I realize now that I thought her happiness would make mine possible. My fate was all bound up with hers, and that still feels true. What haunts her haunts me. The darkness is something shared between us, as real as our blood and just as elemental.

Debbie Weingarten | Longreads | April 2017 | 10 minutes (2,609 words)
The winter that I leave, the desert nights become so cold that cactuses uproot beneath the weight of ice. Old saguaros the size of trees lay like fallen men in front yards and on medians. Under the ink sky, it is so dark that the mountains disappear—even the wall of the Catalinas to the north—and I lose my compass entirely.
I am standing at the door, my breath freezing in punctuated wisps beneath the porchlight. The sky is a low-hanging ceiling, and the city lights have swallowed up the stars. If I could, I would make a bed from the clouds. I would turn like a dog in a rounding ritual before lying down.
Don’t go inside, thrums my heart, and so I stand, idling, inspecting bricks and mortar, the very bones of the house. I do not know it, but the thought of leaving has made a home in my body. It is an animal scratching toenails at the walls.
***
The lady at the Motor Vehicle Department has done-up fingernails stamped with tiny chevron lines. I feel underdressed. She says I need to take the car to the emissions testing center, even though the check engine light is illuminated and we both know it will fail. But she needs proof that it will fail so the car can be transferred out of the ex-husband’s name and into mine. Besides our children, this is the last thread that connects us, and the rope will not fray.
There are inspection and penalty fees, extra paperwork, countless people meddling in one 1998 Volvo station wagon. I am consumed by the work of untethering. I consider giving up, abandoning the car on the side of the road, gifting it to someone in need of a dry place to sleep.
The seat belts snap apart while driving. The driver’s side door panel falls off. The glove box is secured by a jumbo paper clip. The rearview mirror will not adjust. Everything in this stupid car is coming loose. When I clutch the steering wheel, mine are the white knuckles of vulnerable mothers. Read more…

Guernica has an essay by novelist Ayana Mathis about owning one’s writing ambitions, despite never really having felt entitled to them. In this excerpt from Double Bind: Women on Ambition, an anthology edited by Robin Romm, Mathis’s opens with an experience beyond her wildest dreams: A phone call from Oprah Winfrey, who tells Mathis her debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, is a pick for Oprah’s Book Club. From there Mathis delves into the things that had held her back from reaching for great achievement, and sometimes still do: Her mother and grandparents stressing the importance of being reserved and never seeming hungry. The messages she received as a young black girl about not being deserving were often the opposite of what was promised to the much more privileged “lean-in crowd.”
Now we have arrived at the heart of the matter: the legitimization of desires. In order to write the novel, I’d had to first acknowledge that I wanted to write it, that I could and would write it. Why had it taken nearly forty years for me to understand that I had the right to my ambitions? This is not a question for the lean-in crowd. That conception, of leaning in, useful though it may be to some, is the province of the entitled classes. Women who come to the big boy’s table with education and privilege; perhaps just not quite enough to make more money, to have more power, to be more successful. This is an inadequate model that implies that the old hierarchies, the old systems of inclusion and exclusion, the old distribution of power and wealth are perfectly acceptable, it’s just that the ladies should be sitting at the big table too. I and mine are not lean-in women. Mine is a long and illustrious heritage of elegant survivalists and creative realists. We made our way without a road map, or even a road, as is the case for those of us who were, by virtue of race and class and gender, barred from the paths to success. We have dreams aplenty, some realized and some not, but the manifestation of our ambitions is not a given. It isn’t even a given that we will recognize our right to have them.

Sixto testified that he had lived in the US since 1986. He owned a home and paid a mortgage of $812 a month. He owned a 2003 Chevy and a 2008 Dodge super-duty truck. He had a 401(k) plan worth about eight thousand dollars. He had about six hundred dollars in savings. He paid child support. He had studied English for eight months at a community college.
When asked by the court if he could find work in Mexico, Sixto testified that the roofing systems he installed and the building materials he used would not be available there. He did not think he could support his family. Sixto argued that the court should not underestimate the importance of a father to the lives of his children.
The court found that Sixto and his daughters provided credible testimony. It did not, however, conclude that his children would suffer “unconscionable” hardship should he be deported. The court denied Sixto’s application.
In March 2014, the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the court’s decision and gave Sixto sixty days to voluntarily leave the US.
At Guernica, journalist J. Malcolm Garcia profiles forty-eight-year-old Sixto Paz, a roofer with a family and no criminal record who moved into a church to avoid deportation. Garcia discusses the uncertain future of sanctuary sites, where Federal immigration authorities have rarely detained undocumented migrants.

Carmen Maria Machado’s stunning essay in Guernica on the power of women who take up space is an important read for people of any size. Midway through the piece, she describes what happens to self-perception when you live in a world where there’s little representation of your physical self, and what representation there is is mocking or shaming.
Every day, I look for myself in other women’s bodies. This is what happens when you never see yourself in television shows or catalogues or movies—you get hungry. In passersby, I seek out a faithful replica of my own full chest: my plastic-bag stomach pooched over jeans, my milk-carton hips, and my face with its peach-pit cheekbones set in coffee grounds. In this way, I see myself in pieces, mostly, and have to assemble my body in my mind.
It isn’t like my mother and the woman buying the peppers; I’m not disgusted or afraid. I just want to know what I look like to other people. And every so often, I get to see all of those pieces together, and it feels like the reverberations after an orgasm—a low, deep satisfaction.
The beautiful fat woman is across from me on the subway platform, chewing on her nail. She’s trying on really nice shoes in the same store where I am trying on really nice shoes. She’s catching her reflection in a window in the hatched streets of our shared city, and I can’t stop looking at her. Does she resemble me, or do I just hope that because she’s so beautiful? Does that make me vain, or stupid? Why does seeing a woman who might actually look like me make me want to sit down on the pavement and cry?

In this week’s Top 5, we’re sharing stories by Mark MacKinnon, Rachel Cusk, Carmen Maria Machado, Suketu Mehta, and an excerpt from Bill Hayes.
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