Search Results for: Joan Didion

A Meditation on Pain

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Ira Sukrungruang | River Teeth | Fall 2014 | 15 minutes (3,767 words)

River TeethFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share an essay from Ashland, Ohio’s narrative nonfiction journal River Teeth. Longreads readers can receive a 20 percent discount off of a River Teeth subscription by going here.
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“And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I lie down and let it happen. At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that.” –Joan Didion, “In Bed”

It’s happening, says the woman I love to someone in the other room. The someone is most likely her sister, and I hear the shuffle of clogs on the ruined carpet, the swish and swirl of her turquoise dress. I feel the shadow of her body in the doorway. I hear her breathing, tiny bursts of air through the nose and mouth. I feel and hear everything, but I am not a body. And because I am no longer a body, I do not register sound or voice. I do not register anything. Even my presence on the scratchy carpet. I do not know that I have been lying in the lap of the woman I love as she soothes my sweat-drenched hair, as she whispers that this will pass. I do not hear her because I do not have ears. I do not have eyes. I do not see the hazy outline of her humid-frizzed hair or the worry etched in her face or how she looks down at me and then out the window, out past the dilapidated houses of this rundown block in Lafayette, Colorado, past the Rockies rising in jagged edges to snowy peaks, past logical explanation. Because right now, I do not register logic. Because this pain is not logical. This pain makes me whimper, makes me produce a noise that is octaves higher and sharper than I can otherwise make. I become a supplicant to its needs. I have a mouth. Of this I am sure. I have a mouth but it acts without my guidance. Saliva seeps from corners. Lips chapped as cracked earth. The woman I love feeds me water. I sip from a straw, but all of it dribbles out from the corners of my mouth. All of it wetting my cheeks and chin, like a child sloppy with food. I am a child. I am helpless. I am without strength. I am without will. I believe I might die. That this might be the end of me, this moment. I believe that death would be a relief from it all.

Hang on, she says. It’s almost over, she says. The end is in sight, she says. Read more…

California’s Water Crisis: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

Here are five perspectives on California’s water war, from one journalist’s report from the farms of the Central Valley to an ever-resonant essay on water by Joan Didion, written 35 years ago.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 11, 2014

Making the Magazine: A Reading List

Magazine nerds, here we go: A starter collection of behind-the-scenes stories from some of your most beloved magazines, including The New Yorker, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, plus now-defunct publications like Might, George, Sassy and Wigwag. Share your favorite behind-the-magazine stories with us on Twitter or Facebook: #longreads. Read more…

David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact

Josh Roiland | Literary Journalism Studies | Fall 2013 | 23 minutes (5,690 words)

Josh Roiland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and a CLAS-Honors Preceptor in the Honors College at the University of Maine. Roiland is a cultural historian of the American news media, who researches and teaches classes on the cultural, political, and literary significance of American journalism. This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Literary Journalism Studies. Our thanks to Roiland for allowing us to reprint it here, and for adding this introduction:

David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category. In the years after his death, he has faced charges of embellishment and exaggeration by his close friend Jonathan Franzen and repeated by his biographer D.T. Max. Their criticisms, however, do not adequately address the intricate philosophy Wallace formulated about genre classification and the fact/fiction divide. This article explores those nuances and argues that Wallace’s thinking about genre was complex, multifaceted, and that it evolved during his writing life.

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Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he jotted in very fine print 13 questions. After three innocuous ice breakers, Wallace turned his attention to perhaps the most prominent theme in all his writing: consciousness. Acknowledging the abnormal interview approach, Wallace prefaced these next nine inquires with a printed subhead: “Non-Journalist Questions.” Each interrogation is a paragraph long, filled with digressions, asides, and qualifications; several contain superscripted addendums.  In short, they read like they’re written by David Foster Wallace. He asks Roger Federer if he’s aware of his own greatness, aware of the unceasing media microscope he operates under, aware of his uncommon elevation of athletics to the level of aesthetics, aware of how great his great shots really are. Wallace even wrote, “How aware are you of the ballboys?” before crossing the question out.

Read more…

What High Schoolers Should Be Reading

“Just maybe the novel is not the best device for transmitting ideas, grand themes, to hormonal, boisterous, easily distracted, immature teenagers. Maybe there is a better format and genre to spark a love of reading, engage a young mind, and maybe even teach them how to write in a coherent manner. Thankfully this genre exists: It’s called non-fiction.

“Journalism, essay, memoir, creative nonfiction: These are only things I started reading as an adult because of how little I enjoyed reading novels in high school. Surely, the un-made-up stuff would be more of a bore, I thought. Yet when I finally read In Cold BloodInto Thin Air, the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion, I continually pleaded aloud to my friends in their twenties, ‘Why didn’t anyone make me read this in high school?!'”

Natasha Vargas-Cooper eviscerates the high school reading list on Bookforum‘s blog.

Read the story

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Poison Tree

Longreads Pick

An open letter to Grand Theft Auto IV’s protagonist Niko Bellic about Grand Theft Auto V and video game culture:

“Almost everyone I know who loves video games — myself included — is broken in some fundamental way. With their ceaseless activity and risk-reward compulsion loops, games also soothe broken people. This is not a criticism. Fanatical readers tend to be broken people. The type of person who goes to see four movies a week alone is a broken person. Any medium that allows someone to spend monastic amounts of time by him- or herself, wandering the gloaming of imagination and reality, is doomed to be adored by lost, lonely people. But let’s be honest: Spending the weekend in bed reading the collected works of Joan Didion is doing different things to your mind than spending the weekend on the couch racing cars around Los Santos. Again, not a criticism. The human mind contains enough room for both types of experience. Unfortunately, the mental activity generated by playing games is not much valued by non-gamers; in fact, play is hardly ever valued within American culture, unless it involves a $13 million signing bonus. Solitary play can feel especially shameful, and we gamers have internalized that vaguely masturbatory shame, even those of us who’ve decided that solitary play can be profoundly meaningful. Niko, I’ve thought about this a lot, and internalized residual shame is the best explanation I have to account for the cesspool of negativity that sits stagnating at the center of video-game culture, which right now seems worse than it’s ever been.”

Source: Grantland
Published: Sep 25, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,650 words)

18 Deep Interviews with Great Writers

"Frost/Nixon" — Imagine/Working Title Films

Kevin Smokler is the author of Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books you Haven’t Touched Since High School, an essay collection on the year he spent rereading 50 canonical texts from high school English class as a 39-year-old adult.

Out of everything shared in the #Longreads community, I particularly love the interviews. I even created my own hashtag (#deepinterviews) and you can find my most recent picks here.

And when it comes to authors, a great interview can completely reframe a book that you’ve read a thousand times, or give you the onramp into an writer’s work you haven’t yet experienced. Below are five of my favorite sources and recent discoveries for outstanding author interviews:

1. The Paris Review

Favorites: Take your pick. I’m particularly fond of authors you know are great talkers (Dorothy Parker, James Ellroy), who don’t show up much in MFA programs (William Gibson, Maya Angelou) and those who work in more than one genre (Joan Didion, Lillian Hellman).

2. The Millions

Favorites: Adam Mansbach, Michelle Orange and Katherine Boo.

3. AV Club

Favorites: Terry Pratchett, TV Critic Alan SepinwallJonathan Franzen.

4. eMusic Q&A

I’ve been an eMusic subscriber for years and had no idea they trafficked in audiobooks. That is until I ran across a very fine Q&A with short story writer Elissa Schappell. The audiobook of Schappell’s collection “Building Blueprints for Better Girls” was the excuse to talk with her not only about her work but the music that inspired it.

Other favorites: Eddie Huang, George Saunders, Greil Marcus, Ernie Cline.

5. Book Riot

Favorites: “Their 15 Minutiae” (with Emma Straub here) in which writers are asked about everything EXCEPT books and writing. Conceived and executed by bookseller Liberty Hardy, it’s a brilliant example of how an interview with an author should reveal the author as an interesting person who writes books not someone interesting because they write books.

Addendum: Ms. Hardy is also the creator of Paperback to the Future, a Netflix/Personal Shopper for Books kind of program. Which means she is crazy busy these days and “Their 15 Minutiae” is on temporary hold. We understand why but still say “come back soon.”

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Share your favorite interviews in the comments.

Reading List: What's In A Dream? Writers Explore New York


Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

As my service year winds down and I begin to look for jobs, I’m simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the New York mythos. Here are four pieces that explore the romance, the real estate, the heartbreak and the hard-at-work.

1. “Here is New York.” (E.B. White, 1949)

White discusses the “nearness of giants,” the essential alone/never alone dichotomy and general spectacle of New York, N.Y.

2. ”Goodbye to All That.” (Joan Didion, 1967)

The yin to White’s yang, here is Didion’s quintessential emotional examination of New York.

3. ”I Want This Apartment.” (Susan Orlean, The New Yorker, February 1999)

The cutthroat Manhattan real estate market calls for a sharp-eyed guru. Enjoy pre-recession prices and capitalization of the word “internet.”

4. ”At Home on the Church Steps.” (Mindy Lewis, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, February 2013)

As apartment buildings are converted to condos, Lewis watches a dear neighbor become homeless and wonders at “a future where compassion is always trumped by enterprise.”

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Photo: JWPhotography2012

Longreads Best of 2012: Doree Shafrir

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Doree Shafrir is the Executive Editor of BuzzFeed. Her story, “Can You Die from a Nightmare?” was featured on Longreads in September.

This year I read a lot of great personal essays, but these were my favorites.

Meaghan O’Connell, “Places I’ve Lived: A Nanny’s Room, the Perfect Sublet, and a Place You Can Instagram,” The Billfold

The story of young people moving to New York and learning how to navigate the city, particularly its real estate, will never get old, but it’s hard to do well/without sounding like you’re trying to mimic Joan Didion. I loved Meaghan’s piece because it was so perfectly of its time and place, and yet managed to capture the timelessness of feeling that, for the very first time, you’re really on your own in a city that doesn’t give much of a shit. 

Lena Dunham, “Seeing Nora Everywhere,” The New Yorker 

No one could quite believe it when Nora Ephron died, partly because she’d concealed her illness from all but her closest friends and family, but also because she was the premiere chronicler of love and relationships and making it as a woman, and if she was gone, what did that mean for the rest of us? There were lots of tributes to Nora Ephron, but Lena Dunham’s resonated the most with me, because she portrayed so beautifully Nora’s brilliance, her empathy and her wit.

Amity Bitzel, “My Parents Adopted a Murderer,” xoJane 

The particulars of the story were so outlandish that it almost seemed impossible for someone to write about it eloquently, but Amity Bitzel’s essay about her parents adopting a young man who had murdered his parents, and what it was like for her as a 13-year-old, managed to be affecting and beautiful, and maybe most amazingly, not sensationalistic. 

Emily Gould, “Laughing and Crying”, Emily Magazine 

Emily is so, so good at talking about those feelings that you’d really rather not admit you felt, much less put on the internet, and she is also really good at being funny about it and making bigger points about success and jealousy and autobiography. She writes in this piece, which is also about “ladyblogs” and a visit to PS1, “I have made so many decisions based on my desire to never seem publicly weak or vulnerable,” and that seemed like just about the most perfect articulation of human behavior I’d ever read.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

On the 1988 presidential campaign:

Among those who traveled regularly with the campaigns, in other words, it was taken for granted that these “events” they were covering, and on which they were in fact filing, were not merely meaningless but deliberately so: occasions on which film could be shot and no mistakes made (“They hope he won’t make any big mistakes,” the NBC correspondent covering George Bush kept saying the evening of the September 25 debate at Wake Forest University, and, an hour and a half later, “He didn’t make any big mistakes”), events designed only to provide settings for those unpaid television spots which in this case were appearing, even as we spoke, on the local news in California’s three major media markets. “On the fishing trip, there was no way for television crews to get videotapes out,” the Los Angeles Times noted a few weeks later in a piece about how “poorly designed and executed” events had interfered with coverage of a Bush campaign “environmental” swing through the Pacific Northwest. “At the lumber mill, Bush’s advance team arranged camera angles so poorly that in one set-up only his legs could get on camera.” A Bush adviser had been quoted: “There is no reason for camera angles not being provided for. We’re going to sit down and talk about these things at length.”

“Insider Baseball.” — Joan Didion, The New York Review of Books, October 1988

See more #longreads from Joan Didion

Photo: cliff1066/Flickr