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Dispatch from Puerto Nowhere

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Robert Lopez | Longreads | October 2019 | 25 minutes (6,239 words)

For years I’ve been misquoting the late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz without knowing that Milosz is the one I’ve been misquoting. I’ve done this, I’m sure, because I heard someone else misquote Milosz. I’m pretty sure this person did so without attribution, as well.

How far back it goes is unknowable, of course, but it’s akin to a literary game of telephone that is entirely without consequence or the least bit interesting.

What I’ve been saying is this: When a writer is born into a family, it’s the end of the family.

I preface this statement with the safe and inarguable, “A writer once said …”

I used to think Flannery O’Connor said this about writers and families, as it sounds like something she would’ve said.

It isn’t very scholarly or academic to say, “A writer once said,” but it gets the point across to students. I trot this misquote out whenever I’m trying to get my students to risk more on the page, whenever I see them pussyfoot around potentially interesting and dangerous material. I use the Milosz quote to give them license to let it fly, to destroy themselves and their families.

I employ any number of quotes and misquotes when I teach fiction and nonfiction writing to students. Babel, Hemingway, Faulkner, Chekhov, Didion, Pritchett, Hannah, Shakespeare, O’Connor, Borges, Stengel, Berra, Ray Charles, A writer, etc.

The actual quote from Milosz is: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”

I like the misquote better.

There’s a finality to the misquote that feels apocalyptic, whereas the actual quote sounds softer. One can finish a coffee table or a deck. One lover can ask another, “Did you finish?” and it would be considerate, thoughtful. A diamond is finished as are countless other precious gemstones and earthly items.

A family finished can mean they’ve attained the pinnacle of human achievement. No reason to go any further, to go forth and continue with this mindless multiplying, for we have birthed a writer.

Of course, it could be an issue with translation, too, and there’s no accounting for that. And I don’t know where the quote comes from, if it was in a poem or essay or lecture or what. A google search doesn’t provide this information, and I will have to dig deeper.
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End of Discussion

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  8 minutes (2,066 words)

This will be impossible to tweet. It always is. How do you siphon 2,500 words into 280 characters? More importantly, how do you turn a measured thesis into something interesting, and by interesting I mean shareable, and by shareable I mean divisive. It’s one thing to say, I don’t know, “Todd Phillips is a no-talent ass clown;” it’s another thing to imply that over more than a thousand words analyzing the bottomless lack of depth in Joker. “It was literally like ‘Let’s make a real movie with a real budget and we’ll call it fucking Joker,’” the director told The Wrap in September, his defense against accusations that his film intentionally glorified a character who many considered an incel antihero. And it wasn’t just the critics. Victims of the 2012 Aurora shooting, which took place during a The Dark Knight Rises screening, even asked for donations to survivor funds and gun violence intervention programs. Phillips was confused by the controversy. “Isn’t it good to have these discussions about these movies, about violence?” he asked. “Why is that a bad thing if the movie does lead to a discourse about it?”

It’s not a bad thing, except this isn’t a discourse. To have a discourse you need a modicum of intellectual humility on both sides, which is to say, both sides need to have some idea that what they believe might be wrong in order to actually be receptive to the opposing opinion. Neither Phillips nor the social media mob he was taking issue with were having a discourse. It’s hard to blame the latter, since the thing getting in the way was not so much them as it was the medium. It’s easier to blame Phillips, whose party line is that he broke the mold by taking a simplistic trope and turning it into a profound piece of art that explores contemporary fears, when, in actual fact, it only signals depth while remaining superficial. In a similar display of contradictions, now that his clown movie is being swept up into a complex discourse, Phillips is refusing to engage with it, instead opting for reductive dismissal that mirrors the online critiques he so openly disparages. Read more…

Bikini Kill — and My Bunkmates — Taught Me How to Unleash My Anger

Jeff Kravitz / Getty, Seal Press

Melissa Febos | Longreads | excerpted from Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger | October 2019 | 13 minutes (3,398 words)

My father and I sat in near silence for the four-hour drive to western Massachusetts. The worst possible thing had happened: my father had read my diary. Now, my parents were sending me to summer camp for three weeks. Over the previous eighteen months, I had undergone a personality transformation. They had seen the outward signs — how my grades slipped and my once gregarious and sweet disposition now alternated between despondency, sulking, and fury. The diary revealed that this new me also lied and drank and spent as much time as possible in the company of bad influences and older boys who either believed that I really was sixteen or didn’t care that I was actually thirteen. I, too, was confounded by my transformation and so my diary offered a meticulous accounting of events with little reflection. When I imagined my father reading it, my mind blanched white hot, like an exposed negative. My body was brand new but felt singed around the edges, already ruined in some principal way.
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Swipe Right: A Reading List about Online Dating

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They wrote you an intro

Wow and hello. You seem phenomenal and you probably receive four million messages but I just couldn’t resist…

Gorgeous woman, you are taller than me. I’m bummed.

I am capable of taking care of you financially, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I love unconditionally, with all my heart, and I love you as you are. 

Your hair looks nice. See ya.

My self-summary

Some days I log in and read introductory messages that ring hollow, like the promises of car salesmen. Others, I receive long and far too intense missives declaring love or making some other absurd commitment based on a quick glance at my photos. And most days, I receive a tepid “hey.” Most days, I ask myself why I bother maintaining a profile –– what am I hoping to find? And isn’t there a better way to date?

I had never used a dating app until a few months ago: a combination of introverted tendencies, a series of summers spent at an evangelical Christian camp, and a traumatic sexual assault in college made it so I was scared to form relationships with people I knew in real life, let alone strangers on the internet. But after my first long term relationship ended, I moved across the country to a town where I knew hardly anyone and made a profile for the first time. While uploading photos and answering questions, processes which underscore just how much artifice is involved with online dating, I grew a little nervous. I had heard stories from friends about men who ghosted them; who retaliated viciously via email and other social media platforms when rejected; or who showed up to the date and weren’t exactly who they said they would be. After being in a safe, committed relationship for so long, the idea of trusting someone to be kind and respectful on a first date was nerve-wracking, but I took precautions in my own way, and tried dating.

At first, it was fun, even exceeded my expectations. I met people I otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to find within the scope of my daily life. I explored parts of my new locale with people who have histories here, and enjoyed visiting places I’ll continue to return to. And the dates were lovely, for the most part. There was homemade pizza and wine in a park; dates who snuck away to secretly cover the bill without asking for anything in return; and hikes where we foraged for berries in spots only a local would know. 

But there was also the guy who lived at home, told me his mom cooked for him every night, and that he would expect his partner to do the same. There was the man who told me, after a few dates, that his friends had agreed I was “too smart” because I had earned my PhD. And, there was the date who leaned across the table to pet my hair and told me I would be “even hotter if I hunted,” though he had proselytized veganism to me just moments before. 

After some time, skimming profiles no longer excited me. Instead, the series of photos started to look like a grid of loneliness, in each answer some sort of want.

I spend a lot of time thinking about

Are dating apps the best way to meet people in this day and age? Do they even work?

Gina DiVittorio’s viral video about dating on Hinge.

How much of my relatively positive experience on dating apps is based on location? My identity as a straight, cis, white woman who has an invisible –– rather than visible –– disability?

Are there ways to improve online dating so that it is safer, more inclusive, and less discriminatory?

What I’m actually looking for

The same as everyone else, probably: to permanently log off these apps.

1. What I Learned Tindering My Way Across Europe (Allison P. Davis, March 21, 2016, Travel + Leisure)

I use them all—Tinder, chiefly, but also Hinge, Bumble, Happn, Desperat*n (I made that one up) 3nder, Flattr—and they are all swipes to nowhere. In boom times I experience a weak trickle of men; during drought, it’s like I’m in the dating version of The Martian—except Matt Damon did eventually receive messages from humans.

When Allison P. Davis left Brooklyn to travel across Europe, she wondered if dating would be any less lackluster, or if Tinder would offer her anything other than sex. In chronicling a variety of dating experiences and encounters in London, Berlin, and Stockholm, Davis ruminates on the differences between dating in the U.S. and abroad, particularly as a black woman. 

2. Diary (Emily Witt, October 25, 2012, London Review of Books)

Subletting an apartment for a week in San Francisco, Emily Witt goes to a bar alone in hopes of finding some form of human connection. Instead, she ends up perusing OkCupid. Witt, in this piece, offers a comprehensive history of online dating and ruminates about the specific kind of loneliness that beckons people to online dating apps. 

I wanted a boyfriend. I was also badly hung up on someone and wanted to stop thinking about him. People cheerily list their favourite movies and hope for the best, but darkness simmers beneath the chirpy surface. An extensive accrual of regrets lurks behind even the most well-adjusted profile.

3. ‘So Can You F*ck?’: What It’s Like to Online Date With a Disability (Sarah Kim, April 15, 2018, The Daily Beast)

It’s not news that lots of women receive ridiculous and misogynistic messages on dating apps, especially on Tinder. But as a 22-year-old with cerebral palsy, I get one at least twice a week.

‘So can you f*ck?’

‘But you look normal in your pictures.’

When Sarah Kim creates online dating profiles, she questions whether or not to immediately disclose her disability or to let potential suitors get to know her before sharing. By interviewing a range of experts like sexologist Dr. Mitchell Tepper and therapist Dr. Danielle Sheypuk, and other people with disabilities who have dated using apps before, Kim offers valuable insight and ultimately comes to the conclusion that how –– and when –– to disclose can be handled in a variety of ways, and decisions are best left up to each individual.

 

Related read: Online dating is hard enough. Try doing it with a disability. (Timothy Sykes, January 18, 2014, The Guardian)

 

4. How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love (Kevin Poulsen, January 21, 2014, Wired)

As summer drew to a close, he’d been on more than 55 dates, each one dutifully logged in a lab notebook. Only three had led to second dates; only one had led to a third.

Most unsuccessful daters confront self-esteem issues. For McKinlay it was worse. He had to question his calculations.

After largely striking out on OkCupid, Chris McKinlay decided to put his mathematical prowess to the test, using a Python script to create a database of women’s answers and subsequently analyze patterns. With his unconventional approach, he succeeded in going on far more first dates –– but not many at all led further. As Kevin Poulsen notes in this strange and fascinating story, McKinlay had to strike a balance between calculation and human intuition in order to find true love.

5. What It’s Like To Date Online as a Trans Person (Brittany Wong, October 29, 2018, Huffington Post)

Tinder only enabled users to select gender identities such as “‘transgender,’ ‘trans man,’ ‘trans woman’ and ‘gender queer’” three years ago. Slow to evolve, OkCupid, Tinder, and Grindr have put transgender users at risk in their failure to incorporate inclusive models, as Christiana Rose, Dawn Dismuke, and Jackson Bird explain in their interviews with Brittany Wong.

Though roughly 1.4 million Americans identify as transgender, there’s still a widespread lack of understanding of trans issues among the general public. And sadly, transphobia is on the rise; 2017 was the deadliest year for transgender people, with at least 28 deaths tracked by the Human Rights Campaign.

6. I Thought My Immigrant Mother Would Never Accept My Queerness. I Was Wrong. (Krutika Mallikarjuna, February 19, 2019, Bitch)

Of the many pitfalls of being a queer desi woman swiping through Tinder, I never expected to find myself getting trashed in a bar trying to forget that I was on a date with a white girl named India.

After a date unsettles her, Krutika Mallikarjuna finds herself reflecting on her mother’s reticence to accept her as queer, and experiences a deep depression. Mallikarjuna, in this essay excerpted from The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America, chronicles the ways her relationship with her mother has evolved as a result of therapy and phone calls, eventually leading to shared laughter over a date gone wrong.

7. ‘Least Desirable’? How Racial Discrimination Plays Out In Online Dating (Ashley Brown, January 9, 2018, NPR)

OkCupid released a blog post in 2014 showing dating that “most men on the site rated black women as less attractive than women of other races and ethnicities. Similarly, Asian men fell at the bottom of the preference list for most women.” Through interviews with people who have encountered racism on dating apps, and interviews with experts who consider how apps might evolve to become more inclusive, Ashley Brown offers a harrowing portrait of the harm caused by racist dating app users.

Other dating experts have pointed to such stereotypes and lack of multiracial representation in the media as part of the likely reason that plenty of online daters have had discouraging experiences based on their race.

8. Guys are Reporting Women On Tinder for the Crime of Not Being Into Them (Lauren Vinopal, September 10, 2019, MEL Magazine)  

After Lauren Vinopal politely declines a date with a man, he sends her a slew of rude text messages before reporting her to Tinder, resulting in her being banned from the platform. When Vinopal researches the cause, she discovers she’s not the only woman to be banned for rejecting a man –– in fact, there are a large number of others who share her experience.

Many other people have reportedly been banned for reasons that have nothing to do with terms and conditions — e.g., disclosing that they have herpes, identifying as transgender, or in the strangely specific case of 32-year-old Nichole, posting a picture with a dead deer during hunting season.

9. Why It’s So Hard for Young People to Date Offline (Ashley Fetters, September 5, 2019, The Atlantic)

Such a staggering number of millennials start dating because of connections made through apps that Camille Virginia wrote a book called The Offline Dating Method, which provides tricks and tips for potential daters to make conversation in public and frequent places where they might find a partner. Ashley Fetters, in addition to providing an overview of Virginia’s book, contemplates how much the era of “stranger danger” and the increasing prevalence of convenience in apps across the board –– in areas of food, services, etc., –– have contributed to people relying on online dating.

In the years since, app dating has reached such a level of ubiquity that a couples therapist in New York told me last year that he no longer even bothers asking couples below a certain age threshold how they met. (It’s almost always the apps, he said.)

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

He Never Intended To Become A Political Dissident, But Then He Started Beating Up Tai Chi Masters

Longreads Pick

He’s a so-so MMA fighter with political views that are moderate at best. But since he’s outspoken on the internet — most recently, about Hong Kong — he’s become one of China’s best-known dissidents.

Source: Deadspin
Published: Oct 3, 2019
Length: 14 minutes (3,596 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Remembering journalist Jamal Khashoggi
A candlelight vigil to remember journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. (Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Evan Ratliff, Gene Weingarten, Zachary Fagenson, Michael H. Keller and Gabriel J.X. Dance, and Clio Chang.

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Queens of Infamy: Njinga

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (5,741 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.

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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

Late into the 16th century, Kengela ka Nkombe gave birth to her second child. Her first had been a son, and she had dutifully named him after his father, Mbande, the future king of Ndongo. This one was a girl. The birth was difficult; the baby was breech, her face was upturned, and the umbilical cord was wrapped firmly around her neck. Royal attendants were able to safely guide the baby out of her mother’s body, but everyone present agreed that the birth foretold an unusual life. Mbande, who openly doted on Kengela as his favourite concubine, was immediately smitten with his newest child. He named her Njinga, from the Kimbundu verb kujinga, which means to twist or turn — ostensibly a reference to the cord wrapped around her neck. But perhaps as he held his daughter for the first time, he caught a brief glimpse of her future: how she would twist and turn to outwit her enemies, gain the throne, and, ultimately, fight for her country’s freedom.

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The Bread Thread

Daniel Grizelj, Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Emily Weitzman | Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,335 words)

 

EMILY WEITZMAN IS A HUGE FUCKING SLUT.

 

The words leap out of the computer screen and hang in the air. Enlarging, colliding, rearranging:

 

EMILY WEITZMAN IS A HUGE FUCKING SLUT.

Emily Weitzman Is a Fucking Huge Slut

Emily Weitzman Is Fucking A Huge Slut

Emily Is Weitzman Fucking A Slut

Weitzman A Fucking Slut

Huge Fucking, Emily:

SLUT.

 

When I sign on to my college’s gossip site, the “Anonymous Confession Board,” there’s my name at the top of the homepage. The words glare back at me. I rush into my dorm room and shut the door. I’m terrified the entire freshman class has seen the post by now. “Anonymous” could be in my English class or my dorm room or my bed. I hide in my room and call my friend Lisle, four floors below in Clark Hall. She has seen the thread and already begun retaliating. But every time she replies to defend me, the insult continues to rise to the top of the homepage. Lisle decides we should force the post down the page by starting another thread. Instead of writing slander, we set out to find a topic that’s neutral, undeniably loved.

The answer is simple: bread.

We call it: “The Bread Thread.” Lisle explains: “Everyone loves bread!” Maybe you don’t eat bread, but you likely don’t despise it either. The first post begins: I FUCKING LOVE BREAD! Soon someone adds: I thought no one could relate to my obsession with bread! People get into friendly debates on what’s the best bread spread. They post about white bread, wheat bread, flat bread, pita bread, rye bread, corn bread, banana bread, tortilla. “The Bread Thread” spreads across campus. Everyone writes of their love for the loaf.

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Grandiose and Claustrophobic: ‘Prozac Nation’ Turns 25

Riverhead Books

Anne Thériault | Longreads | September 2019 | 6 minutes (1,607 words)

 

When I was 20, I cornered my ex-boyfriend in his bedroom during a party and cried on him for two hours, leaving a watery mascara stain down the front of his shirt. When he finally managed to extricate himself, I found his best friend and did the same to him. I made the rounds of the party, rehashing my misery to anyone who would listen: how my ex had broken my heart, how I was certain that I was an unloveable failure, how I thought about killing myself. I knew that I should stop and go home, but I couldn’t; my feelings were huge and immediate; the thought of being alone was unbearable.

I’d always been an over-emotional cryer, but that year was a personal nadir when it came to mental health. There had been the breakup, then I’d lost my housing situation, and finally, financial problems had forced me to drop out of school. I went from being an occasional downer to a wailing banshee party-ruiner. I just couldn’t differentiate between the immediate relief of dissolving into tears and the long-term gratification of cultivating emotional continence — probably because I no longer believed I had a future. My friends were exasperated and wanted to know why I couldn’t just stop doing things that made me feel bad. My answer — everything made me feel bad anyway, and I just couldn’t help it — seemed insufficient even to me.

A few weeks after the party crying incident, I found a copy of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation at a secondhand bookstore. It had been out for nearly a decade, but up until then I’d resisted it. For one thing, I’d actually been on Prozac for the previous three years, so reading it seemed a little too clichéd. For another, I was skeptical that the beautiful girl on the cover, with her clear skin and artfully messy hair, could know anything about my ugly life. But by the end of the prologue — titled, with extreme subtlety and nuance, “I Hate Myself And I Want To Die” — I was hooked.

Whether we like it or not, Prozac Nation really did change the landscape when it comes to the way women write about themselves.

Prozac Nation is a young person’s book, both in terms of its author and its target audience. It’s full of florid language, sweeping generalizations, and an obsessive, unproductive introspection. Each chapter begins with an epigraph from someone like Albert Einstein, Sylvia Plath, or Edith Wharton. Many of the original reviews were negative, and offered valid critical perspectives on the book. The text did need a stronger editorial grip, at the very least to fix the distracting moments when Wurtzel jumps from one tense to another within the same paragraph. The narrative really was just as repetitive and self-pitying as critics accused it of being. Wurtzel seemed to have no perspective when it came to her own behavior, offering it all up for consumption without any kind of analysis. But all of this (tense-jumping aside) might be the book’s secret genius.

Prozac Nation was the first time I saw myself reflected in writing about mental illness. Sure, I’d read and loved Plath, Kaysen, and all the other stars of the depressed-lady canon, but none of their work was as relatable to me then as Wurtzel’s prose, at once grandiose and claustrophobic. It’s the kind of book that feels like edgy literature to a white girl in her early 20s, and I don’t mean that as snidely as it might sound; everyone deserves their own version of On The Road or Naked Lunch for that period in their life. Prozac Nation read to my 20-year-old self like something I aspired to someday write, precious epigraphs and all. At one point early in the narrative, Wurtzel voices a worry that her story is “too stupid, too girlish, too middle class.” But that was exactly why it resonated with me. Even the parts that grated on my nerves, like Wurtzel’s frequent bewailing of the fact that she had once been the best little girl in the world, sounded like me. In fact, I had a litany of similar regrets that I dragged out whenever I was down; I called it my catechism, which I thought was witty and ironic. There are certainly times when Prozac Nation feels monotonous and solipsistic, but that aligns with my own experiences with depressive spirals. Repetition and self-obsession are part of the nature of the illness.

Wurtzel was oversharing before oversharing even became an everyday term we use, writing in a way that made people recoil with discomfort.

What seemed most important to me about Wurtzel’s writing was that she had been messy, and she was willing to detail that mess without apology. Just: here is how I’ve behaved. She offers the reader no contextualizing, no explaining, no objective distance from the events described. I still can’t tell if Wurtzel did this intentionally or not — and, if it’s a device meant to draw readers deep into her own stream of consciousness, she doesn’t always wield it skilfully — but either way, it was a radical departure from how I’d seen women write about themselves. I’d never read a story about a woman engaging in such rambunctious self-destruction that didn’t turn into a morality tale; on the other hand, there was no shortage of stories about men being comparably messy. This isn’t meant to be a bad faith argument about how “equality” means women deserve to behave just as badly as men, but rather that youthful messiness is a reality for people of all genders. There is power in seeing yourself represented, warts and all. How do you survive something if you don’t know that someone else has already survived it, too?

Whether we like it or not, Prozac Nation really did change the landscape when it comes to the way women write about themselves. It laid the groundwork for the what Jia Tolentino called the “personal-essay boom” of the early 2010s, an era when no detail was too graphic, no humiliation too private for sharing. Wurtzel was oversharing before oversharing even became an everyday term we use, writing in a way that made people recoil with discomfort. But, like so many of those XOJane-style pieces, she also made people feel seen. Wurtzel’s writing has influenced how I write about mental illness; it’s made me more committed to relate my experiences in honest ways, rather than style them to appear more understandable or sympathetic. Through her, I’ve learned that it’s much more interesting when I center myself in my own narrative rather than the feelings my readers might have about it. The embarrassing personal details are, somehow, what makes these stories relatable. I’m sure there are many others whose writing owes a similar debt of gratitude to Wurtzel, even if they don’t realize it.


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Prozac Nation was published on September 25, 1994, three days after Friends premiered on NBC. Both are emblematic of that era: angsty Gen-X youth and the golden age of television sitcoms. Like many cultural artifacts that are very rooted in their particular time and place, neither has aged very well. Wurtzel’s semi-premise — that the use of SSRIs was too widespread, that America had become a nation of pill-poppers who were drawn to Prozac because of its name-brand trendiness — seems especially unsturdy. For one thing, she doesn’t even encounter the drug until the very end of the book, and when she does take it, she experiences a swift and nearly miraculous recovery. For another, all of the panic about SSRI consumption seems, in retrospect, almost adorable in its unfoundedness. Doctors were pushing the idea that oxycontin was non-habit-forming in any amount, but people were worried about Prozac?

Re-reading Prozac Nation again after all these years felt a bit like being a 20-year-old melting down at a party: embarrassing, but somehow comforting in its familiarity.

Many of those concerns piggybacked on the very real problems with mid-century tranquilizer use, but they were also influenced by what psychiatrist Gerald L. Klerman termed pharmacological Calvinism: the idea that a drug that alleviates unhappiness is morally questionable. It’s an attitude that’s still very much present today, even though the use of SSRIs has become more normalized over the past 25 years. Pharmacological Calvinism is what makes your high school friend share those memes describing nature as the real antidepressant. It’s what leads people to view medication that treats anxiety and depression as a “crutch” rather than an ongoing and necessary treatment (which is a weird framing in and of itself, considering that people rarely use crutches unless they really need them). It’s the reason we hear arguments like the one in David Lazarus’ recent Los Angeles Times essay, where he describes himself as a “drug addict” because quitting antidepressants caused him to experience symptoms of depression, and quotes doctors praising the “work” of not taking medication as compared to the “easy” out of taking a pill every day. Of course, some people do experience adverse reactions while discontinuing use of SSRIs, but history has largely proven them to be quite safe compared to many other medications that experience similar faddish moments.

Re-reading Prozac Nation again after all these years felt a bit like being a 20-year-old melting down at a party: embarrassing, but somehow comforting in its familiarity. It made me feel grateful, above all else, for no longer being young. It’s such a relief to get older and be less vulnerable to Big Emotions, to have better coping skills, and to know how to opt out of drama. But I’m also grateful to my younger self for being deep in that depressive morass and still managing to navigate us to where we are now. I don’t hate her for who she was, as much as she sometimes failed to measure up to who I wanted to be. I try to be tender to her and understand that she was doing the messy best she could. Hopefully Wurtzel feels the same way.

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Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based writer whose bylines can be found all over the internet, including at the Guardian, The London Review of Books and Longreads, where she created the Queens of Infamy series.

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Editor: Ben Huberman

Cahiers du Post-Cinéma

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | September 2019 |  9 minutes (2,452 words)

The new release I most wanted to see during the Toronto International Film Festival was Unbelievable, the Netflix series that is neither a movie nor was it screening at TIFF. I was more taken by this miniseries, based on the ProPublica and Marshall Project investigation of a number of real rapes in Washington and Colorado, than by any of the movies I saw. But then, I have a particular affinity for this kind of mid-budget drama: real-looking people solving real problems in a real world, wading through the complications of humanity — “God shows up looking for someone to be of service, clean things up a bit, and he says, ‘Whom shall I send?’” — this is my shit. It’s the kind of thing you saw regularly at the cinema in the ’70s but that now tends to be relegated to streaming sites. I wonder how much of my affinity for Unbelievable — eight hours, three days — had to do with the fact that I could watch it at home. Alone. For free (well, Netflix-account free). Whether if all other things had been equal, but it had been playing at TIFF, I would have felt the same. Would I have felt the same had I chosen it over something else, doubt over my decision percolating in the background? Or if I were watching next to critics who liked it much more than I did, or much less? Or if I’d had an anxiety attack because I was assigned a middle seat (aisles only)? When the stakes are high, it’s harder to see past them. Read more…