Alexander Chee in Polaroid, taken by Michael James O’Brien at the Lure in New York for XXX Fruit’s launch party.
Alexander Chee | Longreads | October 2018 | 10 minutes (2,448 words)
My first move to New York begins at the back of a Queer Nation meeting in San Francisco in 1991, with a man visiting from New York with his boyfriend who tried to pick me up. I turned him down as a way of flirting only with him. He seemed at a loss as to what to say next, and so I said, When can I get you alone?
We stood at the back of that meeting for some time, not quite willing to walk away. We hadn’t known each other long but the attraction we felt that would end up tearing up our lives and remaking them was already in charge. We exchanged addresses, deciding to be pen pals, then wrote each other letters for months. We met up again at a writers conference, then wrote more letters. He broke up with his boyfriend and got an apartment by himself. The answer to my original question then seemed to be, Seven months from now, in New York. And so I put my things in San Francisco up for sale and boarded a bus for New York that summer, with a copy of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess as reading material, and my best friend, who we’ll call S.
S and I dressed more or less alike for the trip, as we had for much of our friendship. If memory serves, we were both reading the same book. We made White Goddess jokes the whole way. We wore jean cutoffs, combat boots, and sleeveless hoodies, and sat in seats next to each other, emerging from the bus for smoke breaks. Our aesthetic then was modeled mostly on the comic Tank Girl and what we could remember of issues of The Face, and I had recently shaved my own head after a long night in Oakland that served as something of a private goodbye to San Francisco. S was coming with me a little in the way of a best man or a bridesmaid, as if I were getting married. I wasn’t used to getting what I wanted from love, and survived through intense friendships instead. We had been inseparable best friends since meeting, writing in coffee shops and stalking used bookstores for books by Joy Williams, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Andrea Dworkin, Marilyn Hacker, and, yes, Joan Didion, and so while he joked he wanted to make sure of me, and I wanted him to — I didn’t trust myself — we were also, I think, preparing for being without each other on a daily basis.
Natalie Lima | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,165 words)
Yesterday I woke up and looked at my body in the mirror. My nightgown was tighter on my stomach, the folds in my skin forming a silhouette of my shape on the fabric. I’d put on more weight over the summer. Panicked, I gathered all the visible clothes in my bedroom, pulled them off hangers and out of drawers, and threw them into a hamper. I carried the hamper outside. The sun was out and directly overhead, but the desert-winter air was cold, and I could see each puff of my breath in front of me. I tossed the hamper onto the driveway and some panties spilled from the top. A white cat sitting across the street, licking itself, scurried off. An elderly man with a Fitbit on his wrist speed-walked directly in front of me, past my house, but didn’t acknowledge me, which was perfect, as I was still in my very snug nightgown, braless, and standing over a laundry basket with panties spilling out onto my driveway.
I looked up at the bright sun (only briefly because it hurt my eyes) and I lit a cigarette and burst into tears, chunky black eyeliner from the day before streaking my face and running down my chest like wet soil. After a few puffs, I dug out the nail polish remover that I’d thrown into the basket during my frenzy, and I emptied the liquid onto the mound of clothing. Then, without a moment of reassessment, I flicked the remainder of my burning cigarette onto the hamper and watched one of my favorite maxi dresses slowly ignite. And everything else in the basket followed. Before long my driveway was a summer bonfire against a Tucson mountain range. A car alarm went off close by, but I didn’t know whose it was; I didn’t care either. My knees buckled and I fell back against the garage door and slid to the ground. Sobbing, I watched my now too small clothes burn into ashes right in front of my house. I eventually lifted the collar of my nightgown and hid my face underneath. “Oh my god, when did I get so fat?!” I cried and cried into my chest. After who knows how long, I leaned over and blacked out.
* * *
Everything you just read was a lie. But as I was writing that opening scene, I did imagine the deep satisfaction of being able to take all the crap in your life that upsets you and burn it up. However, despite my fondness for melodrama, there’s no way that story could have actually been fact because I’m a broke grad student and I have neither a house nor a garage, and I don’t really know anyone else my age (31) who does. My mom owned a house at my age, on a housekeeper’s salary, which I see as a testament to the present economic state in this country, but hey, that’s another essay.
So let’s start with the truth now.
Yesterday I woke up to the song of a lesser goldfinch outside my window (I think that’s what it was, but I’m not one of the Irwins). I announced to my sleeping dog, “Today is going to be a good and productive day!” then leaped out of bed and started a pot of coffee. Eventually I walked into the bathroom and looked in the full-length mirror and I saw myself — my chin was sagging a little lower, my nightgown with a cartoon bunny and the word “friends” printed across the front was snug on my body. It was clear that I’d put on a significant amount of weight in recent months (that part was true).
This happens sometimes, that we actually take a sincere look at ourselves in a mirror and maybe spend a few minutes — probably because of untreated anxiety — picking at some old blackheads populating our nose. But if you’re like me, after excavating some of the grime, you continue on to examine all of the changes in your appearance, notice how you’ve aged, think about your mortality, and remember the cross-country drive with your mom the summer your dad left and you turned 15, and how she made you leave your dog behind with a stranger, and how you didn’t see the point in existing anymore — not without your sweet pitbull who used to lick your eyeball without warning. And in the middle of this musing, you finally pause and tell yourself: Stop thinking about your childhood traumas before 8 a.m. Then you lean further into the mirror, as much as your back will allow, your nose almost touching it, and you think: Every day I wake up I’m another day closer to my imminent death.
This is when you know it’s time to turn away from the mirror.
Any sort of unwanted bodily change can make me want to sink into myself; it can prompt me to want to cancel all of my commitments for the day so I can brood over a salad and question my current self-care practices (or lack thereof). But usually this is not the case. In reality, things are busy and there is a hot cup of coffee that needs to be drunk, emails that need to be sent, a dog running in circles around my living room who needs to go out (and poop, or things will get ugly and I have carpet). In those first moments of the day, I am quickly reminded that life is in session and the weight is there, whether I like it or not. I know that the fat on my body is part of me, and I can choose to carry it like a backpack weighing me down, bruising my shoulders by the end of the day. Or I can carry it like a fashion accessory that is a key part of the outfit I slipped on that morning. Most days, I make an effort to carry mine like an artsy tote bag that bears an edgy photo of Joan Didion or Frida Kahlo smoking a cigarette.
* * *
How should we actually carry ourselves anyway? I don’t know the right answer to this, but I think about it often, especially since adopting a dog a few months ago. The skin on her belly hangs low, due to overbreeding, due to nature and circumstance. When I walk her, strangers point out how much her stomach sags, how it makes her look much heavier. Sometimes, they even point out the largeness of her uneven nipples. My dog doesn’t care, of course. I watch her move the tiny limbs attached to her sausage-shaped body fearlessly, in a way that I wish we all moved about in the world. I also think about our place as humans in the animal kingdom: our supposed superior intelligence, with our big Homo sapiens brains (though the brain of the sperm whale wins for biggest). Yet we worry about the aesthetics of extra flesh. We worry about how we carry everything around.
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When I was growing up, my mom used to tell people that my excess weight was baby fat. I’d run into the kitchen after dinner, during Fresh Prince commercial breaks, and ask her for a second slice of flan. She’d groan, then cut me a slightly smaller slice, with less syrup drizzled on the plate, and hand it to me. I’d smile and leave the kitchen. She’d instantly turn to her friend Kristina, the wife of my father’s best friend and an aerobics instructor. “It’s just baby fat,” my mom would say, sincerely, as she placed the remaining flan in Tupperware. “Hopefully she loses some of it when she goes through puberty. You know, your body changes then.” Kristina would smile and nod. It was evident that neither of them believed the baby fat theory. I didn’t believe it either (I could hear the whole conversation from the next room; our house was, um, compact). After a silent moment, my mom would finally change the topic to the less stressful O.J. Simpson trial.
Presently, I’m the heaviest I’ve been in years. My mom lives across the country now, and I call often to check in and ask about my nephew and sometimes about my brother. My weight occasionally creeps into conversation. It’s never to shame me, not anymore at least. Often it’s me complaining about how I need to get active again, and she listens and agrees. She reassures me that I’ll lose the weight again. Sometimes I’m tempted to say, “Mom, what’s the problem? It’s just baby fat.” But I don’t want to make her upset.
* * *
I’ve spent my entire life in a large body. I have chosen “large” as the most accurate adjective to describe my body because the word is vague, and my weight fluctuates from year to year — 100 pounds lighter one year, 50 pounds heavier the next, 115 down the year after that. Sometimes my body is on the smaller side of large, more Queen Latifah in The Last Holiday, that movie where she’s told she only has three weeks to live so she jets off to Europe, eats caviar, and falls in love with LL Cool J. And sometimes my body is closer to Chrissy Metz in This Is Us, and I eat comfort food late at night, shove the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos wrappers immediately into the trash can, and ask myself, Why is this my life? — all while dressed in fashionable prints and versatile shrugs.
Because of the current body I occupy, I have to acclimate to everything that comes along with it — larger clothes, tighter chairs, and by far the most unpredictable component: people’s reaction to it. Last fall, I ran into one of my former professors who I hadn’t seen in more than a year. We were at a reading, listening to a well-known poet discuss palm leaves and the rhythm in his lines. My professor did a double take when he spotted me across the conference room, his eyes wide open but blank as he sized me up, unsure if it was me or a stalker who was staring too hard at him. Ultimately he turned away, deciding it wasn’t me. I called his name twice, “Charlie! Charlie!” and his eyes finally widened in recognition.
“I knew that was you!”
“Of course you did!” I said but didn’t actually mean it. I gave him a hug and almost added: Maybe I should become a spy since I’m virtually unrecognizable now. In the moment, I thought this joke was funny, but I figured it would have embarrassed him so I refrained.
* * *
My current bodily state is, of course, mostly of my own doing. Bad habits, things I’ve been trying to kick my whole adult life. Then, last spring, I fractured my ankle. I was walking across the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa one day, watching the squirrels run about and bury nuts. I had just finished my tutoring shift in the Writing Center, where I’d spent the past hour copyediting a male student’s paper, an argumentative essay for why abortion is murder and should be made illegal again. To decompress, I stopped in front of the campus library and watched the squirrels for a while. One squirrel sprinted across the grass into a little hole it had dug itself and popped back out with a nut in its hands like a magician. Two other squirrels wrestled near a large tree (at least I think this is what they were doing; I don’t know a ton about nature without Google). After a stressful afternoon, watching these animals do their thing — watching life in motion — soothed me immensely.
A few minutes later, I continued my walk back to the parking lot to play the “Where did I park my car this morning?” game, and I looked up at the cloudless blue sky. Every existential thought I’ve ever had filled my head: Wow, life is so beautiful/Why don’t we all take time to slow down more often?/We’re all glued to our smartphones/We don’t appreciate the simple things anymore/I remember a time when I used to pick up the phone and call all my friends/Maybe this is why our society is sick and full of broken people, because we don’t take time to pause/I wish I could play the cello/I think I’m lonely/What is connection in this world anyway?/Nobody connects anymore, except to send nude photos/I can’t believe Snapchat moved past the era of sending temporary nude photos to strangers/When all my religious friends started using Snapchat to send photos of their weddings and babies, I knew I was getting behind the times —
Then I tripped. Not on something blocking my path that shouldn’t have been there — like a rock or a fallen tree branch after a springtime windstorm. I simply fell over nothing. Which has become the most unimpressive ankle fracture story anyone has ever heard. Sometimes I have to share how I fractured it; I actually have to say it aloud. “Can you slow down?” I plead with a friend as we walk to a class together. “I messed up my ankle a few months of ago.” They always reply with a sympathetic “of course” and proceed to slow down because my friends are decent people. But, invariably, the follow-up question is: How did you mess it up?
“I tripped. That’s it.”
“Over something? Was it during sex?” they joke.
“No,” I chuckle. “I tripped, just walking. There was no sex. Well, there were squirrels. What I’m saying is: My life is horrible.”
My friend laughs and pats my shoulder in consolation.
* * *
Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t live in a body? Or if we all lived in ones that looked exactly the same? I imagine us like Flubber, a green goo-like substance bouncing around a lab and happily jiggling all day. All of us green and unwieldy and free. However, I have considered how this sameness could eventually get boring. Sometimes we might have the desire to pair up with someone less green and more blue, or someone less gooey. Sometimes we might not appreciate the ordinariness of our own gooeyness and sink into a depression and chronic self-loathing. But this concept — of what life would be like untethered to a body — never leaves me.
* * *
A few weeks after tripping over air, after some squirrel-watching and ankle-fracturing in Tuscaloosa, I left my program and moved home to South Florida. It was for the summer only, before driving out to Tucson to try out a new grad school and a new, larger, more progressive city that seemed like a better fit. The move back home made for a good kick to my ego. Not only was I less mobile and speedily putting on weight, but I was also in my thirties and moving into my mother’s three-bedroom apartment — an apartment she shares with her husband, my younger brother, his girlfriend, and my 3-year-old nephew, Mugen.
I spent those weeks hobbling around, and because there wasn’t much space, I slept on a small daybed in the living room. Each morning I awoke to the song of a screaming toddler who, for some reason, was always fed in a high chair placed two feet from my head. At night I often cried into my pillow, distressed about the current shape of my life, regretting that I quit my full-time job and gave up my crappy-but-cozy apartment in Los Angeles to attend graduate school — for the financially lucrative dream of writing short stories. Though I slept in the middle of the living room, and though I was the largest person living in my mom’s apartment, I remained essentially unseen. No one knew of my daily weep-fests. Everyone else’s life, too, was in session.
The night before my cross-country drive to Tucson, my mom returned home from work and cooked my favorite meal — garlic chicken, red beans and rice, and avocado salad. She was calm as she stirred the beans, and it calmed me to watch her. My mami, nine inches shorter than me and less than half my size, mothered me that night. I decided to ignore the past few weeks so I could enjoy this last meal with her. I forgot about my screaming nephew and the tiny daybed. I forgot about my body and my messed up ankle, and decided — for just that evening — I didn’t have a body because bodies didn’t exist anymore. That night I was a glob of green goo.
My mom handed me the avocado salad and sat down. “Mi’ja,” she said. “Wasn’t it nice to get to spend these last few weeks with little Mugen?”
Before I could answer, my brother stepped into the kitchen. He rested his hand on my shoulder.
“What are you two talking about?” He asked.
“Natalie was just saying how much she’s gonna miss Mugie.”
“Aww,” my brother said. “Isn’t he the sweetest?”
“I think I’m getting a dog,” I said, then shoved some rice into my mouth.
* * *
What’s great about relocation is that everyone in the new place is unfamiliar with your body. They’ve never known its shape any bigger or smaller; there are no emotional attachments to the way they assume its size should be, like the disappointment when you see the plate with your favorite recipe come out of the kitchen with too much cilantro on top. People fasten themselves to what they’re used to, including bodies they don’t live in. A perplexed glance from a friend or loved one at a party, and you’re instantly reminded that you showed up covered in too much cilantro.
* * *
Once I had driven past miles of endless cacti, after listening to all the available X Factor auditions on YouTube and every mediocre cover of Whitney Houston in existence, I eventually reached Tucson, Arizona. I quickly moved into a modest apartment (and by “modest” I mean it had roaches). When I noticed the the bugs zigzagging across the bathroom floor one night, I called the apartment manager to complain. “We don’t have roaches here,” she said. For me, this translated to: Natalie, move out before you wake up with roach eggs lodged in your ear canal.
By this point I had acquired some furniture — a new bed, some tables, a reading chair — and I needed a truck to transport everything to the new pest-free apartment I’d found. However, I was nearly broke from traveling, and my parents failed me by never teaching me any practical moneymaking skills, like carpentry or identity theft. This left me having to brainstorm creative ways to secure a truck without landing myself in jail — in a city where I had no one to bail me out. I could:
(a) spend the last bit of my travel money and commit to never eating ever again;
(b) sell my voice to Ursula the Sea Witch in exchange for Prince Erik to come help me move my stuff with his royal carriage; or
(c) sell my kidney.
I settled on the only realistic option — (c).
Okay, I’m kidding. I decided that before making any hasty decisions, I’d sleep on it.
A couple of days before I was scheduled to move out, I found myself at Circle K, wearing a raggedy dress that should have been relegated to pajama status, pumping gas and buying a Chaco Taco to help me cool down from the Arizona heat (but who doesn’t love a Chaco Taco in the winter, too?). On my walk back to my car — ice cream–filled taco in hand — a tall, lumberjack-looking dude stepped out of his truck to pump gas. He sized me up with the eagerness of a dog who has spotted the can of wet food instead of the kibble.
“I like your dress,” he said.
I offered a half-hearted “thanks” and quickly licked up the vanilla ice cream running down my hand. He walked into the store, and I looked over at his truck. I stared it down just as he had done to me. It was a giant, white Ford F-150, definitely big enough to transport all my furniture in a single trip. It was perfect. When he came walking back to his truck, I appraised him. I quickly decided that I wasn’t picking up on any serial killer energy, based on nothing except that he was smaller than me and I felt I could take him in a fight, if it came to that.
“Hey! Sir.” (Don’t ask me why I called him sir, I already hate myself.)
He turned to face me, with the jolly, wide-mouthed smile of a 13-year-old who just met his favorite Laker — which just so happens to be the same exact smile of a man who thinks he might be able to stick his dick in you.
“Any chance I could borrow your truck to move some furniture?” I asked, eyes twinkling. “I’m new here.”
My lumberjack’s smile wilted. “My truck?” What?” The confusion on his face was unexpected. Wasn’t he used to people in his life asking to borrow his big-ass truck? Isn’t that what trucks are for?
“No,” he huffed. “What I’m looking for is a date. With a big, sexy lady like you.”
If this had been the first time I’d been told something like that, had it been the first time a man I’d never met announced how much he likes big women — like it was suddenly my lucky day — I might have clenched my pearls. But this wasn’t the first time, because I’ve been in this body for more than three decades — and all of those decades fat. After a big sigh, I looked over at his truck again and, in my mind, kissed it goodbye. “I understand,” I said, nodding. “But I can’t go on any dates right now. I need a truck to move my crap.”
I jumped into my car and sped off.
* * *
There’s a scene in the series finale of Sex and the City where Carrie walks around Paris, sad music playing in the background, wallowing in her sorrow. She has recently abandoned her life in New York to be with her artist lover in France. However, upon her arrival, her lover is busy preparing for his upcoming show at some fancy art gallery and has no time for her. This leaves Carrie exploring the City of Love alone. During one of her solitary, daily walks she passes by a busy cafe and, through the window, notices a group of women sitting at a table, laughing hysterically together. The women remind her of her own best friends, back in New York, and suddenly her face falls and she sinks into a deeper state of melancholy.
Anyone who has moved to a new city can, to some extent, relate to Carrie’s loneliness (though we haven’t all been invited to Paris by Baryshnikov). Now take that loneliness and compound it with the inherent loneliness of living in a large body, of having to navigate the world in a body that is often stigmatized, made invisible or hyper-visible at any moment. A multilayered loneliness.
* * *
The next day I rented a U-Haul and moved into the new apartment without trouble, just an achy lower back and some sweat stains on my shirt. I slunk down onto the carpet, then lay flat on my back and attempted some stretches I saw on YouTube. Mid-stretch, my phone buzzed. It was a text from a good friend, a meme:
Dear Big Girls:
Don’t be afraid to get on top
If he dies, he dies
I cackled. Which hurt my back a little, but the laugh helped me relax. I let my body unfurl on the floor right then, let it just be for a while. I rubbed the (supposedly new) carpet with my fingers and thought about every awkward romantic encounter I’ve ever had (which I blame on porn and the patriarchy but that, too, is another essay). The text from my friend was a magical moment of big girl solidarity, where I was reminded that I am never alone in this complex existence inside of a body. Everyone has to deal with living in a body and, some of them, bigger bodies like mine. So the next time I find myself climbing on top of a man, laughing because of the meme, I know he likely won’t die. But if he does, there are certainly worse ways to turn up one’s toes.
* * *
Natalie Lima, a 2016 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and VONA/Voices alum, is an MFA candidate in creative non-fiction at the University of Arizona. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the absurdities of living in a body.
Mary Wang | Longreads | September 2018 | 23 minutes (5,814 words)
1. Care /ker/ [verb], 保护 bǎo hù, the process of protecting someone or something.
In January 2018, Guo Zhen, my grandmother, was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. A month later, I arrived home for the first Chinese New Year that I’d spend in China since I had moved away 20 years earlier. I came home with my armor ready — my suitcase was packed with a library including Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s canonical book on the illness; Susan Sontag’s Illness and Its Metaphors, so that my analytical mind could help carry the weight of my emotional one; and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a manual for grief in the event of the worst-case scenario. I had rehearsed the serene facial expression I’d use when I’d see Guo Zhen in her hospital bed for the first time, and I had conscientiously visualized every IV drip and beeping machine to blunt any potential shock. Yet what I found in our family home was the rehearsal of a familiar routine: Her son, my uncle Fu Yuan, was still battling with his son to choose his homework over his iPad; Guo Zhen still sat on her children’s stool in the morning, washing clothes in a bucket of cold water, and grandfather, Pu Cheng, still bugged her to play their daily chess game, holding up a paper board fortified so many times over that the plastic tape covering it was far thicker than the board itself.
Guo Zhen didn’t know she had cancer, and my family had carefully devised a strategy to keep it that way. Doctors and nurses in the hospital had been instructed to never speak of her illness in her presence, and visitors to our home signed an invisible contract before entering, agreeing to act as if her recent hospitalization was due to a case of pneumonia. I never asked her to sit down when she’d get up after every few bites during lunch or dinner to restock the table with congee, buns, or pickles — I knew she did this out of habit rather than necessity. Fu Yuan and his wife never fought to take over her housework, though we worried about the strain of repetitive hunching on her weakening body. Any deviation from routine risked puncturing the facade of normalcy we all worked carefully to preserve, and, within a month, my family had become a theater troupe improvising their first performance, an intimate Truman Show designed to deceive its protagonist.
At 78, there was no point in performing surgery or chemotherapy on Guo Zhen anymore, and any new miracle drug that might land in the world would only arrive in China years after its introduction on the American market. Besides, the decidedly optimistic belief that cancer will soon become only a chronic illness rather than a fatal one is more of an American specialty — its arrogant nature evident when President Nixon declared a “War on Cancer.” The Chinese counterpart to that phrase illustrates a different approach. As one local newspaper put it, “One third of cancer patients die of fear, one third die of its treatment, and only one third die of the illness itself.”
Since there wasn’t much territory to be won in terms of Guo Zhen’s illness or its treatment, we shifted our efforts to shielding her from the first possibility. As soon as doctors saw the dark spots on Guo Zhen’s X-rays, Fu Yuan instructed them to follow our script. “Don’t let the lao ren” — the elderly — “know,” he said, emphasizing Guo Zhen’s status as a senior to make clear that she was no longer a caretaker but the one who was cared for.
“If a man die,” William Carlos Williams wrote, “it is because death / has first possessed his imagination.” Grandfather Pu Cheng, unaware of the American poet, has long touted his own version of this phrase. Boasting about how he’s never stepped foot in a hospital for himself, he’d say, “Nine out of ten people die from fear.” Even though Pu Cheng was also left in the dark about his wife’s disease — we didn’t trust him to keep a secret from his partner of 60 years — we abided by his logic that a doctor’s diagnosis could be a death sentence in itself. By shielding Guo Zhen from the weight of the doctor’s words, we took over the burden of her illness with our own shoulders. Read more…
Photo by: Moritz Vennemann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
In the opening piece of her new memoir-in-essays Nothing Good Can Come from This, Kristi Coulter meanders through a Whole Foods stocked with displays of rosé and reckons with the demands of her new sobriety. The scene embodies the difficult journey she’s started. Alcohol is everywhere; on billboards, on ice cream, on coworkers’ desks, Worse yet, work meetings frequently involve drinks. Coulter finds ways to not only quit drinking, but to survive as a woman in a misogynistic culture soaked with booze, a culture where, as she describes it, “There’s no easy way to be a woman, because, as you may have noticed, there’s no acceptable way to be a woman. And if there’s no acceptable way to be the thing you are, then maybe some women drink a little. Or a lot.”
An erudite, reflective writer with a winning sense of humor, Coulter’s explorations move beyond drinking to examine feminism, sexism, privilege, happiness, and work. Many readers will see themselves in her, and the book will let those who have never had a substance abuse problem come to better understand friends and family who do—and maybe see the levity in the darker side of life.
When did you start writing about your life and recovery? And how was your experience of that initial process?
I started writing about my life and my recovery via a blog, Off-Dry, that I created in 2013 when I was about 60 days sober. At the time, my impulse wasn’t about writing so much as it was about being part of a community. There’s a vibrant sober blogosphere, and in those early days, I spent at least an hour a night reading posts from people who were far enough along in their sobriety to serve as a lantern for me. I wanted to start recording my own experience, both to process it and to help the newly sober. When I started the blog, I hadn’t written for the sake of writing (much less for art’s sake) in well over a decade. I’d gotten my MFA at 24, and when I had failed to magically become world-famous by 30, I sulkily turned my attention to other forms of achievement. It didn’t take long before I found myself using the blog not just as a way to test out my voice as a sober person, but to shape and experiment with my writing voice, too. I started writing fiction again at about six months sober, and once I’d come out publicly as sober on my second anniversary, I began writing the personal essays that ultimately led to Nothing Good Can Come From This.
What was it that moved you to switch from writing fiction to personal essays? Did coming out publically help you locate both your voice and material?
I think coming out publicly did help me to realize I’d stumbled onto some pretty rich material, yes. As I started to experiment with writing about sobriety — and the topics that float around it, like feminism and pleasure and willingness to live in permanent ambiguity — I found a voice emerging that was more direct and acerbic and edgy than either my fictional voice or my real-life one. Exercising that blunt voice worked for the topic — a lot of recovery writing is pretty earnest — and I wanted room to be funny and irreverent. It also somehow made me a happier, bolder person. Fiction writing is still important to me, but for now, I’m very glad my essay voice and I found each other.
What other essayists have influenced you?
So many! I read Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext in college and was taken by how matter-of-factly she wrote about her body and mental illness and sex. I was nowhere near ready to broach those kinds of subjects myself, but the permission I took from reading her stayed with me. I read David Sedaris for his mastery of tone, particularly the way he can have you giggling out loud and then just stick a knife in you. I read Claire Dederer’s Love and Trouble, which is a memoir but also a collection of essays, and it directly influenced how I approached topics of marriage and sex. Also, I don’t know if they are essayists per se, but I’m intensely interested in the work of writers like Sarah Manguso and Maggie Nelson, who write short, densely packed, aphoristic pieces that live somewhere between essay, prose poem, and memoir.
Between Roxane Gay, Megan Stielstra, Scaachi Koul, Angela Morales, Michelle Orange, Martha Grover, Alice Bolin and Meaghan O’Connell, we live in a golden age of female essayists. Many more commercial presses are publishing women’s essays, but book publishing is still a tough business. What was your experience like getting this book published in today’s market?
My publishing experience was pretty oddball. I had won a few prizes and published some short stories in literary quarterlies in the late 1990s, but my trail stopped there, e.g. I was basically a complete unknown as of 2016. What happened is that I self-published a version of “Girl Skulks Into a Room,” one of the essays in the book, on Medium, and it went very mildly viral. Daphne Durham, a former co-worker who had since become a literary agent, texted me even before she’d read the whole thing: “There’s a book in this.” I thought the notion of me writing a whole book about anything was wildly optimistic, but over a few coffee dates Daphne helped me to see what she saw, and we started working together on a book proposal. Daphne was an absolutely fantastic editor for my work, and in the process of editing me, she realized how much she enjoyed editing. So as we were getting close to having something ready to shop, she accepted an Executive Editor role at MCD/FSG, and after some time she and Sean McDonald spent working through their vision for the imprint, she ended up acquiring my book.
In the interim, another essay I self-published on Medium, “Enjoli,” went hugely viral, and that brought a lot of agent and editor attention my way. It was a life-changing experience. But when it came to finding a home for the book, I didn’t feel a need to play a bunch of angles to maximize that one moment. I knew I wanted to be with an influential but smaller house like FSG, where a debut author wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle, and where they would have an eye on my long-term potential. And I already knew I loved working with Daphne. So it was pretty much a no-brainer to go with FSG. The day I got the offer, I pulled a bunch of FSG books off my shelves — Joan Didion, Frederick Seidel, Ben Lerner, Laura van den Berg ─ and stacked them on my coffee table and just stared at them going “Holy fuck.” And two years later I’m still largely in that “holy fuck” place. So my experience was a bit of a fairy tale. I know how hard it is for even very good work to get recognized in this business, and that it’s on me to take a fairy-tale start and turn it into a sustainable career.
Joan Didion famously said, “Writers are always selling somebody out.” How have loved ones reacted to your book so far?
An advantage of having “Enjoli” go viral is that there are now strangers on literally every continent who have now read or heard me talk about drinking and sobriety. That’s fantastic desensitization therapy. I feel as matter-of-fact about that part of my life now as I do about having brown hair or growing up in Florida. And I’ve also heard countless addiction stories from otherpeople in the last few years, so addiction feels very normal to me now, probably more standard than it actually is. I could hang out and chat about addiction with friends, family, or Dick Cheney (why did he come to mind? I don’t know) all day.
It’s the Other Stuff — about sex, adultery, being kind of a selfish jackass sometimes — that gives me palpitations. My husband, the only person whose permission I sought to tell some of these stories, is fully on board. He’s so on board that he has threatened to have the book cover airbrushed onto the side of his surf van, and to wear a t-shirt with “John” (in quotes) on it to events just so he gets full credit. Friends have also responded with astonishing enthusiasm and acceptance, even nonchalance. I’m only slightly disturbed that people don’t seem to find any of the revelations very surprising. My parents have yet to read the book, and I’ve actually requested they not, because I just don’t think anyone needs to know some of this stuff about their kid. (I was inspired to make that request by hearing Roxane Gay say she’d asked her parents not to read Hunger. “I didn’t know I could DO that!” I thought.) They might still choose to read it, but I’ve let them know I’m not available to process it with them from a content perspective. I’m not going to use the book as a vehicle to relitigate past history. (Same goes for ex-boyfriends, in case any are reading this!) The book is a memoir, yes, but both memoirs and their narrators are constructs. What readers are getting is one truthful view into my life, not a diary.
Your book is deeply reflective and probing, but it’s also hilarious. I laughed countless times, frequently in public. Can you talk about your ideas about the role of humor in personal nonfiction or literature in general?
I’m glad you found it funny! I’m fortunate to have a temperament that can find humor in nearly anything. When I first seriously contemplated getting sober, I had the misconception that it would require a depth of earnestness on my part that would crowd out humor, and that was not an appealing prospect. When I finally got unhappy enough to make the leap anyway, I quickly realized that getting and staying sober demanded seriousness of purpose, which is not the same thing as earnestness or reverence. In fact, I learned that if I couldn’t find humor in sobriety, I probably wouldn’t make it, because I’d be covering up my authentic self, not revealing it. So in writing this book I liked the idea of showing others that you can be dead serious about remaking your life without falling into groupthink or a cult of positivity. (Though I’ll add that, as Leslie Jamison discusses in The Recovering, groupthink can be very useful in its way, especially early on when it’s dawning on you that literally millions of people have been in your shoes and have things to teach you about finding new, better shoes.)
In terms of humor, in personal nonfiction or literature in general, there’s nothing more exhilarating than realizing an author finds the same weird things funny that you do. It’s a tiny but deep bonding moment, like when I meet someone who agrees with me that celery tastes like metal crossed with evil. But that humor has to be organic. I don’t use humor in my writing because I think it should be funny; I use humor because it’s one of my natural ways of coping with my own core desperation and terror and whatnot, so that comes through in my voice. Forced humor, which I can fall into as much as any writer, is just painful. I also think it’s important, at least in books, to be funny in a way that will age well. It’s one thing to make super timely, Shrek-type jokes about pop culture in a blog post or other ephemeral form, but a whole book full of one-liners about, like, This Is Us, or Scott Pruitt’s Ritz-Carlton hand lotion? That makes me feel tired now, and in five years it won’t even sound like English.
NEW YORK - JANUARY 09: Soul singer Aretha Franklin reviews a copy of her album "Aretha Franklin - Soul '69" at Atlantic Records studios on January 9, 1969 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Aretha Louise Franklin was born in a small house on Lucy Avenue in Memphis, south of where the Mississippi River borders the city, on March 25, 1942. By the age of 2, she moved to Buffalo, NY, and then by 4, Detroit, where she’d live most of her life and where she died this Thursday morning, at the age of 76. Her father, Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin presided over a congregation at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. Aretha began singing there as a child, and through his connections, she met Sam Cooke, Dinah Washington, Clara Ward, and Mahalia Jackson, all innovators who would influence the kind of musician she became. At 18, Aretha Franklin signed to Columbia Records, the recording home of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. She released seven albums, then moved to Atlantic in 1967, where she released the string of recordings for which she is most well known, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Lady Soul, and Aretha Now.
Franklin became commercially successful and critically lauded. She earned 18 Grammy Awards and dominated the now defunct category for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance with 23 nominations and 11 wins. (Anita Baker won it the second most, with 5 wins). What a female vocalist was and could be, inside and outside the soul tradition, was and is forever altered by what Aretha did behind her piano. “She is the reason why women want to sing,” Mary J. Blige told Rolling Stone.
I love ethereal Aretha, when she sang atop the flutes in “Daydreaming.” But I also love how the bridges in “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Ain’t No Way sound like a crisis, a love panic, and the slow build and back and forth with her backing vocalists in “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” Aretha Franklin’s catalog is vast and deep, spanning decades, registers, genres. Here is a list of my favorite longreads for and about her so far.
It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that Aretha’s flip of Redding’s more conventional, male-dominant song of domestic conflict and desire into a hymn of sexual and political liberation paralleled the creative subversion in those sermons. Her most distinctive rewrite, the addition of the “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/ Find out what it means to me” bridge—which it’s still shocking to recall was completely absent from the original—has a touch of a preacher’s pedagogy, the moment when the celebrant might focus in on a scriptural passage and muse, “Think of this word, ‘respect.’ What does the Lord mean when he uses it? What does it mean, for example, within your own home?” But to keep proceedings from getting too heady, she immediately cuts in with language from the street: “Take care, TCB” (meaning “take care of business”) and “sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me” (meaning … well, that’s up to you).
The author recalls a life of listening to and watching Aretha.
I don’t claim to know what a woman’s got to do to make it in America these days, or ever. I am still only beginning to feel my way in that darkness. That said, when I look at, listen to, or think about Aretha Franklin, I recognize in her person what I want one day for myself. In her I see a certain awareness that life is difficult and life is wonderful and that, either way, you pick up and carry on with your shoulders as square and your voice as strong as you know how to make them. Either way, you pick up and carry on with an awareness that the world out there is larger than any me or you, her or him, but also that you and me, he and she is where it all began in the first place. In her I see a way of living that is equal parts heart and head, a way which never loses sight of priorities. She has remained stalwart in her conviction of self. And that means something these days, as I sometimes wonder whether being oneself even matters anymore.
We all have people we feel this way about. One friend says she learned to live from listening to Ella Fitzgerald. My mother says she learned from reading Eudora Welty. Joan Didion certainly showed an uncharacteristic amount of admiration for someone when she wrote of Georgia O’Keefe, “Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keefe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it.”
For me, Aretha reigns with the strength she finds in vulnerability. Flaws, heartaches, mistakes, the stuff of life: These are the things she takes to heart, claims as her own. By claiming, she can then turn them around and offer back to us what she has learned. She can say, “Look at this. Feel this. This is us, don’t you see?” I wish for my own voice what Aretha’s has had from the beginning: a sense of self so strong that she had to open her mouth and sing to keep from exploding, to keep herself whole.
Remnick’s profile of Franklin includes thoughts from former President Obama and a recollection of her December 9, 2015 performance of “A Natural Woman” at Kennedy Center Honors.
A heartfelt recollection from Detriot native writer and documentarian Kelley Carter:
I had backstage credentials and I wanted to see if I could get some time with her — just one quote for my would-be story. Because of the story about her failure to pay bills, she’d cut the Free Press off. No interview requests were granted. Not even to talk about her iconic song and its forthcoming anniversary. But in a room backstage at an awards show, I could be somewhat anonymous.
I raised my hand and she called on me. I’d heard a rumor that she loved the version of “Respect” that this blue-eyed soul group from Ann Arbor, Michigan, The Rationals, had recorded. A crew of white boys from Washtenaw County had taken an Otis Redding track and somehow did something to it that made Franklin and her sisters, Erma and Carolyn, take notice. It was my chance to get something from her. And I would have taken anything from her to help push whatever my story on her ended up being.
I remember her looking out at me as I asked. I purposefully coughed over my affiliation’s name because I knew the disdain she had for the Free Press. She gave me what I was looking for. It was a quick reply; she was humored. “We added the sock-it-to-me’s to it,” she said, looking down on me from a stage in that small room. I could tell for a brief moment that she was thinking of her sisters, who had died long ago: Erma from throat cancer and Carolyn from breast cancer. I saw it in her face. The memory was dancing in her mind.
When I asked my mother, a longtime Detroiter, to tell me what the summer of ’67 in Detroit was like during the thick of the riots, the summer Franklin’s song hit No. 1, I was taken aback as she shared with me how men and women were running in the streets, shouting back at police officers, “Sock it to me!” as they were trying to stay alive, clearly inspired by Franklin’s anthem, which had hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in early June.
This deep dive into the life and preaching artistry of Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father, casts a light on the talents of her parents.
If Aretha did grow up unhappy, her relationship with C.L. would have played a major role. The favorite child bore the weight of a demanding father’s expectations and constant, intrusive attention. Aretha craved C.L.’s approval. “[She]… would do anything to please [her father],” said a later friend. It was far from a healthy relationship. But as a performer, Aretha couldn’t have asked for a better teacher and model than the Rabbi. The tonal variety, for instance, that he wrung from his big voice found an echo in Aretha’s virtuosic shading. No less an authority than Ray Charles saw little difference between the two Franklins’ styles. “She’s got her father’s feeling and passion,” said Brother Ray. “When C.L. Franklin, one of the last great preachers, delivers a sermon, he builds his case so beautifully you can’t help but see the light. Same when Aretha sings.”
I don’t remember my life without the sound of Aretha Franklin’s voice. It was a constant in my home. Her music was something of an altar for my mother, as she returned to Franklin through good and bad times. This became true for me as well. No matter the song, be it the mournful wail of “Ain’t No Way” or the stomping funk of “Rock Steady,” Franklin’s voice gave me a solid sense of place. This was especially true, given that my family moved so much when the rent became too high. But one thing never changed: Franklin providing solace through the surface noise of well-worn vinyl. Her 1972 “Amazing Grace” album, the legend’s glorious return to gospel during the peak of her pop career, has been a musical balm for years. I have never been without a copy.
In her first Time cover story, its writers try to understand soul.
But what is soul? “It’s like electricity —we don’t really know what it is,” says Singer Ray Charles. “But it’s a force that can light a room.” The force radiates from a sense of selfhood, a sense of knowing where you’ve been and what it means. Soul is a way of life —but it is always the hard way. Its essence is ingrained in those who suffer and endure to laugh about it later. Soul is happening everywhere, in esthetics and anthropology, history and dietetics, haberdashery and politics—although Hubert Humphrey’s recent declaration to college students that he was a “soul brother” was all wrong. Soul is letting others say you’re a soul brother. Soul is not needing others to say it.
Where soul is really at today is pop music. It emanates from the rumble of gospel chords and the plaintive cry of the blues. It is compounded of raw emotion, pulsing rhythm and spare, earthy lyrics—all suffused with the sensual, somewhat melancholy vibrations of the Negro idiom. Always the Negro idiom. LeRoi Jones, the militant Negro playwright, says: “Soul music is music coming out of the black spirit.” For decades, it only reverberated around the edges of white pop music, injecting its native accent here and there; now it has penetrated to the core, and its tone and beat are triumphant.
“It’s clear we love the Dead Girl, enough to rehash and reproduce her story, to kill her again and again,” writes Alice Bolin. “But not enough to see a pattern. She is always singular, an anomaly, the juicy new mystery.”
In her debut collection Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, Bolin takes aim at what she calls the “Dead Girl Show” — a genre of entertainment that centers around solving the mystery of a dead, or missing, girl. Approaching the subject with deep intellectual curiosity, Bolin dissects texts and manuscripts — from Joan Didion’s nonfiction to Veronica Mars — that reveal how dead “girls” or women have become a trope of entertainment, serving as a vehicle for sleuthing or as a venue to sort out “male problems.” The result is a compelling case that these plotlines are not merely problematic and inaccurate, but are damaging to society.
The “Dead Girl” genre, Bolin tells me, is not just about gender — it’s equally about race. “There is a lot of privilege wrapped up in the dead girl body, and in the ways that the body is sanctified. That’s a better reason than any to let some of these stories go: the overvaluing of a white woman’s body,” she said. “It’s not good for anyone.” Read more…
We’re in London, somewhere between the British Museum and Piccadilly Circus. It’s Thanksgiving week, and my then 9-year-old and I have been winding our way through the late November afternoon on a marathon walking tour of the city. But now we’re lost. I stop a woman who looks to be in her mid-40s, about my age, to ask for directions, and I quickly realize that she’s one of them: attractive, fashionable in an appealingly unconventional way — and with completely, unabashedly gray hair. Forget the directions. I peel off my hat to show her what’s doing underneath, where I have three months’ worth of roots. “Brilliant. Keep going,” she says. “You won’t regret it.”
For years, and more and more in the past year or two, I’d see them on the street — the striking silver hair on an artist type in her 40s on the sidewalk in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side; the shock of a long gray braid down the back of a fiftysomething woman at a thermal spa in Iceland; the short,gray bangs and bob on my sixtysomething neighbors at the farmers market in rural Maine. The surprising beauty of a woman in her 30s with unexpected, natural gray. Not to mention all the millennials — and Kim Kardashian — dying their hair bottle gray.
Throughout my 30s I’d been a vigilant hair colorer, doing whatever it took to remedy and right the gray roots growing out from my middle part. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when coloring my hair went from an occasional, even enjoyable, splurge — an optional luxury — to a required part of regular beauty maintenance and of my looking professional and pretty. But as I entered my 40s, I found my feminist and aesthetic selves at war each month when I sat in the salon chair.
Then the world changed. The New York Times needle impossibly tipped the wrong way: Trump was elected. During that bleak late autumn and winter, after the fall foliage–filled weekends of knocking on doors for Hillary, I cried myself to sleep and woke up to the steady drum of anger and disbelief. Then, almost a year later, the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and I spent my evenings half ignoring laundry and bath time and bedtime, so that I could keep up with the #MeToo news cycle. Twitter went from a procrastination time suck to a daily engagement in feminist dialogue, with a fervor the likes of which I hadn’t felt since Women Studies 101. We’d entered a time of resistance against our abuser and pussy-grabber in chief and his cronies, and like so many women, I’d absolutely had it with the constraints of patriarchy.
Now more than ever, I resented — even hated — the dye. Having to dye my hair was one more patriarchal rule I didn’t have time or patience for. And Trump’s ridiculous orange dye job made me see the deceptive element in hair color and want to run even farther from the bottle. It’s not just that I didn’t want to keep up with the hassle and expense of coloring my roots a dark brown every four weeks and highlighting the rest of my hair every few months. I wanted to become the kind of woman who could give myself permission to go gray, who’d embrace authenticity and realness, and stop running from the reality of aging and mortality. But could I do it?
Part 1 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.
I.
The place where all the chaos began is a few minutes off Interstate 15 North, where a row of American flags line a curve of rural road and the only sound is the desert wind in their fabric. Two tall flagpoles reach out from a patch of gravel topped with gilded cursive letters spelling out the opening to the U.S. Constitution: We The People.
On them hang several flags, including the American flag, the Nevada state flag, and a blue banner bearing a sharp white V stacked atop a round O — the cattle brand of the last rancher from around these parts, Cliven Bundy. He’s not the only cattleman represented on these poles; a flag bearing the mark of a rancher shot and killed by police flies here, too.
Nearby, just over the Virgin River, a rough road cuts through the dusty Nevada desert. Sandy rocks darken into a deep red all the way out to the horizon, where a dark strip of mountains jut skyward.
Drive down that road and a patch of bright green pops into view — the color of life shrill in a place where everything else looks dead.
It’s here, in Bunkerville, Nevada — in Clark County, about an hour from Las Vegas — that the 72-year-old Bundy owns 160 acres of land: the place where he raised children, grows melons, and rears cattle. A modest house is barely visible from the gravel road. Hay bales are stacked neatly in piles around the property. There’s farm equipment everywhere — hunks of metal weathered by a sun that seems to never set and winds that never cease.
For the better part of the past two years, Cliven Bundy wasn’t allowed to live here. Instead he was housed in a Nevada detainment center, wearing a red jumpsuit and jail-issue orange clogs every day, sleeping in a bunk bed in a room full of other men awaiting trial.
He had been charged with conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States, with assault, extortion, with threatening federal officers.
The trial he faced last fall, in a way, would also decide which of the two distinctly opposite characters Bundy has been portrayed as was real.
There’s Bundy’s version of himself: a rebel cowboy father of 14 and grandfather of 66 who believes the government is determined to either kill him or put him behind bars for life, while also stealing his livelihood.
Then there’s the government’s version of Bundy: a vigilante capable of summoning an army eager and ready to revolt against the federal government.
When it comes to Cliven and the rest of the Bundy Family there are a few points that nearly everyone — no matter how they vote or what side of this case they’re on — can agree:
Number 1: An event of seismic proportions occurred near Cliven Bundy’s ranch in April 2014 when he — believing federal agents were closing in — called people from around the country (many heavily armed) to his aid. Along with them came militiamen: the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, members of western militias. People call this event a lot of things, but the most common name for it is the Bundy Ranch Standoff.
Number 2: At that time, Bundy owed the federal government at least $1 million in grazing fees. For more than 20 years, he allowed his cows to graze on public lands managed by the federal government despite not having a permit to do so. He fought in and out of court about it, and he lost every time. But he didn’t take his cows off the land. They’re still out there.
Number 3: Cliven’s own sons, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, led their own armed standoff in early 2016 at a federal bird refuge in southeastern Oregon.
And last, but not least, number 4: No matter how hard the federal government seems to try to arrest, imprison, or see the Bundys found guilty of federal crimes, they just can’t get them.
“I do not think there is a jury in this country that will convict us,” Ammon Bundy said to reporters last December outside the Las Vegas federal courthouse. Ammon smiled wide, his arm slung around his mom’s shoulders. “The truth is on our side.”
The truth.
What really is the truth when it comes to the Bundys?
For the past two years, I’ve been reporting on the Bundy Family and people who consider themselves followers. I’ve talked to just as many people who see Cliven and his sons as godly figures — prophets, great historical leaders — as people who see them as terrorists, extremists, and the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with America. There seems to be no middle with the Bundy Family: You either are with them, or you’re not. And how you see the family may say just as much about you as it does about them.
This story is one of alternative facts and fake news — two, three years before those terms entered the common lexicon. It is a tale of conspiracy theories, crooked politicians, and two polarized sides who read the same facts and take away completely different messages.
When you look closely at the actions of the Bundy Family, their history, their religion, the words of their followers — you can find a story that reflects so much about America right now. There are deep divides. Unrest. You can’t talk to the Bundys or their followers about cows or land without also talking about patriotism and the flag and the Constitution and the Bible, too. Their definitions of freedom, patriotism, terrorism, and even the law might be exactly the same as yours, or they might be way, way different. To have a conversation with or about the Bundys, you have to accept that they consider themselves to be the ultimate Patriots and that they don’t acknowledge the federal government’s authority. They are here to tell the federal government what to do, and to tell the rest of us how we’ve been bad Americans.
People call their theories fringe. Others call them insane.
The Bundy name in much of the West can make blood boil. And where some have cast the old man as a crackpot, a flash in the pan, the details behind the family’s anti-government actions are complicated, stretching back decades — a century, even.
But when Cliven Bundy strolled out of jail in the first days of 2018 — cowboy hat on his head, his legs free of shackles — and raised a fist in victory, what just occurred seemed simple. For the second time, the Bundys thumbed their noses at the feds and got away with it. Read more…
Headshot of the author at 18, courtesy of the author; body composite by Katie Kosma.
Alexander Chee | Longreads | April 2018 | 16 minutes (3,921 words)
Some years into the writing of my first novel, I was 32, living in Brooklyn and waiting tables in a midtown Manhattan steakhouse a few shifts a week. I worked there instead of some trendier or more downtown place for the exact reasons that made it seem odd to the people I knew: it was a world apart from the one I wanted to live in. The commute was long, 45 minutes on the subway each way from my Park Slope Apartment, but I used the time to read and write, often writing on legal pads as I came and went. My income from three or four nights a week, 5 hours a night, was just 15 percent of what the people who ate there spent on dinners out each year — after taxes, I lived comfortably on this. To my relief, I never saw anyone I knew there, except for a single classmate who worked at Vanity Fair and was good at not condescending to me. Celebrities came so regularly, it was a little like working inside the pages of a gossip magazine. I remember the day O. J. Simpson reserved a private dining room under his lawyer’s wife’s name, but then came out onto the main floor, joking around with the diners. The New York Post cover the next day had a photo of our steak knife, bearing an uncanny likeness to the presumed weapon in his wife’s murder.
The best celebrity sighting for me, however, was Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
The hostess seated her in my section for lunch, at an unassuming but generous table by herself. “I love her,” the hostess said, as she walked by me. We had what I thought of as the ordinary interactions between waiter and guest, and I left, put her order in, and returned to my work. Sometime after her food had been served, she called me over as I passed her table. I stopped and leaned in.
“You’re not a waiter, are you?” She said this with a conspiratorial affection, like she knew me.
“Is something wrong with your service?” I asked, alarmed.
“No,” she said, smiling. “Everything is wonderful. But you’re not a waiter, are you? You’re a writer.”
The lunchtime clamor receded a little around the last word. I felt found out, if in the nicest possible way
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am.” I then asked her why she had asked me that.
“You can just tell,” she said, her smile gone cryptic.
I thanked her, then went back to serving lunch. I tried to think of what it was that had caused her to descend into my station like an oracle and make this pronouncement, the sort of unrealistic deus ex machina moment of the kind I eventually made the topic of my eventual second novel. I was surrounded by coincidences then, a forest of messages from the universe. But this couldn’t have been a coincidence. Surely this was something else, a more divine and direct kind of message. The voice from the burning bush, but instead of a bush, the message was coming from that marvelous smile, the familiar, kind eyes, the perfect hair — and that twinkle.
Here I was again in an old story, one that had begun with people always telling me to be a writer, starting at the age of 14. My interaction with Dr. Ruth that afternoon, though, mattered in an entirely new way. By that time, I had finally decided to be a writer. I just wasn’t sure I could do it. But I was trying. I was halfway through the novel, though I didn’t know that then. The difference Dr. Ruth made, however, was this: she wasn’t telling me to go and become a writer. She was telling me I was one. And that it was finally something visible, even legible, no matter what else I was doing.
Natalie Daher | Longreads | April 2018 | 15 minutes (4,014 words)
The subjects of cultural critic Michelle Dean’s new bookSharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion — including Dorothy Parker, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion and Nora Ephron — have appeared in Dean’s writing and interviews again and again over the years. It’s not difficult to see how Dean would develop a fascination with opinionated women — she is one herself. Lawyer-turned-crime reporter, literary critic, and Gawker alumnus, Michelle Dean’s has had her own “sharp” opinions on topics ranging from fashion to politics, from #MeToo to the Amityville Horror.
The book is more than just a series of biographical sketches. Dean is fascinated by the connections between these literary women — their real-life relationships, their debates, and the ways they were pitted against each other in a male-dominated field.
We spoke by phone between New York and Los Angeles and discussed writing about famous writers, the media, editors, and feminism. Read more…
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