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Putting a New Stone on the Grave: Sjón Brings the Golem to Iceland

Door to attic of the Old New Synagogue where according to myth the golem rests. Slowcentury / Getty

Adam Morgan | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (2,560 words)

In the summer of 1990, an Icelandic writer named Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson traveled to Czechoslovakia with his friend, the singer-songwriter Björk. Their alternative rock band, The Sugarcubes, was performing in Prague because of the city’s folk status as the birthplace of the sugar cube. But while they were in town, Sigurðsson made a pilgrimage to the Old Jewish Cemetery, where the legendary creator of the Golem of Prague had been buried more than four centuries earlier. After placing a stone on his grave, Sigurðsson asked the rabbi for help solving a personal problem, and in exchange, promised to bring the golem into Icelandic literature.

Today, Sigurðsson goes by the name Sjón. In 2013, when his surreal novels were first translated into English by Victoria Cribb, critics compared him to Borges, Calvino, and Kafka. Most of his books are less than 200 pages, but this week sees the publication of CoDex 1962, a labyrinthine epic that invites comparison to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Originally published as three separate novels in Iceland in 1994, 2001, and 2016, CoDex 1962 is Sjón’s fulfillment of the pact he made in the Old Jewish Cemetery almost three decades ago. Read more…

To Be Clean

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Natassja Schiel | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (6,673 words)

I closed the sheer maroon curtain of the private dance nook and needled my eight-inch stilettos through the G-string I’d kicked off minutes earlier to Prince’s “Darling Nikki.” On the single chair, where I usually hovered nude over men, I sat and counted the money I’d made. Only $9. It wasn’t a money-making night. I couldn’t stop thinking about what my younger sister, Melissa, had told me earlier. I was sad, and no one wants to give money to a sad stripper. Even if she fakes happiness, the customers seem able to sniff out insincerity, and it repels them. In six weeks, I’d be moving 3,000 miles away. From Portland to New York. How could I leave my sister behind? What about Melissa?

After wiggling back into my minidress, I stood, forced a smile, and strutted back into the club. I was there to make money, so I had to find a way to become genuinely cheerful. But my motivation deflated after only a few steps. I’ll just go to the bar — watch the girl on stage — and find my bearings. Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater” was playing, and only one girl danced to that song. Mya.

Mya swung upside down, topless, on the monkey bars that lined the top of the stage. Her breasts, not even A cups, were perfect. I admired her dark amber nipples as she swayed in the air. Her wavy black hair hung like a lion’s mane. Sparkling red lip gloss framed her smile. Every seat was filled and a few stragglers even stood off to the side, delighted by her.

Mya appeared carefree. I needed to be like that.

When I had been on stage, there were only two men. A few others had come up and given me pity tips.

“You want a drink?” a man with a deep voice asked me. The question jolted me out of my head. I looked at the speaker peripherally. He was in his early 30s, young — unlikely to spend real money. Occasionally younger men came into the clubs in Portland to hit on the strippers. As if the dancers were not trying to make a living, but trying to find someone to date.

We loathed these customers.

“Sure,” I said and smirked.

“Let’s do a shot. Do you like that whipped cream vodka stuff?”

I shrugged. I didn’t, but it was Mya’s favorite, and that alone made it appealing. The times Mya and I had taken shots, we’d leaned into one another, our cool skin touching. She always smelled like peaches and wore shimmering outfits with glittery jewelry. “Bling it and they will come” was her stripper motto. I’d had a crush on her for two years.

Many nights, while it was slow — common in 2010, deep into the recession — we’d sit together at the bar. We’d both loved dancing at first, and we were both ready to move on with no other job to move on to.

“If you could do anything,” I’d asked her, “what would you do?”

“I wanted to be a vet when I was growing up, but it feels so far out of my reach.” She looked down at the bar instead of at me.

“I bet you could start small. Maybe a vet’s assistant?”

She thought it over. “I know I would still need education of some kind. I feel like I’m too old for that now.”

I laughed. “You’re one year older than me, right? Twenty-six?”

She nodded.

“I’m taking community college classes — my sister, too,” I said. “You aren’t too old. I’ll help you. I’m good at this kind of thing.”

She grinned, the corners of her eyes crinkling. She grabbed my arm and leaned in to kiss my cheek, then pressed her face to mine, staying there for several seconds before moving away.

I learned we both had orange cats that had male names but were girls (hers: Bobby; mine: Raja). That she loved David Bowie and Prince. That like me, she was first-generation American. However, she was proud to be Mexican American. That was not like me — I rejected my Russian and German lineage. I adored Mya so much that despite how badly I needed money, I’d hoped for these nights, huddled up with her at the bar. My feelings for her intimidated me. And even though we’d sometimes make out after hours, I couldn’t bring myself to do more.  

The customer handed me my shot. “I’m Rob, by the way,” he said. This will do it, I thought, this will drown out my sister. We clinked glasses before downing the syrupy-sweet liquor in one swallow. My stomach warmed and I became light-headed. The rush of the first drink on an empty stomach. My shoulders relaxed. My chest loosened. Everything was going to be alright.

“You don’t seem like the other girls that work here. You’re better than this,” Rob said.

I rolled my eyes. “So many men say that, thinking they are being clever or complimentary, but I’m going to let you in on a secret.” I motioned for him to get closer, then whispered into his ear, “The girls I work with are my friends. We hate when customers say that kind of shit.”

“Yeah, but I mean — ”

I placed my pointer finger to his lips. “Shh,” I said.

Rob, like I thought, wasn’t interested in getting a private dance. Or spending money on anything other than drinks. There was no way to make money off him. I surveyed the room from my place at the bar on several occasions, considered introducing myself to someone else — tonight was uncommonly busy. But, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too raw. Opening myself up for any form of rejection, even the faux rejection of the club, might break me.

That was most of dancing. Approaching man after man who delighted in saying no to women who would probably never even speak to them outside the club. Rob bought another round, and I eased into the fact that tonight was going to be another dud. At closing, I had little more than $100. In the beginning of my stripper career, almost four years earlier, a friend had told me: “As long as you make a bill.” Then and still, $100 a night didn’t seem like enough for this job. I’d wanted to make $500 that night, what I used to average. But I hadn’t even made $200 in months.

After the bouncer yelled for everyone to “get the fuck out,” the dancers shuffled into the dressing room. We kicked off our heels, standing flat-footed as we disrobed. Mya wasn’t even five feet tall and once we were both naked, she embraced me, our hot and sweaty bodies stuck together. I loved it — the feeling of being glued to her even for a moment. I breathed her in, peaches and tangy body odor.

“You’re so sexy,” she said and laughed.

Me? No, you are!” It was the first time all night I’d been happy.

She gave me a peck on the lips and then we dressed quickly in jeans and T-shirts.

Mya and I walked out to the parking lot with the bouncer at our side. October was usually wet and cold in the Northwest, but this year it was still dry and warm so it felt like a summer night. My attention was on Mya, so at first I didn’t notice that Rob was standing to our right, in an empty parking space. He tried to convince me to go with him right then “because we had a real connection.” The bouncer stepped between us and told Rob to go, but Rob persisted. I started crying. It was the third time in three consecutive shifts that a customer had waited outside for me.

I adored Mya so much that despite how badly I needed money, I’d hoped for these nights, huddled up with her at the bar. My feelings for her intimidated me.


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“Why does this keep happening?” I asked Mya. The other times I hadn’t cried. I’d made it clear they were crossing boundaries. This time, though, I felt helpless. As helpless as I’d felt earlier that day with my sister. I thought of all the men that had hurt me, and all the men that had hurt my sister. I wanted to take it all away from her, or at least I thought I did.

“It happens to all of us,” Mya said, shrugging. “But you’re too upset.” She took my hand and interlaced her fingers with mine. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

She guided me to her beat-up black Honda Accord. It wasn’t the first time Mya had tried to get me to go home with her. Many times, she’d purred into my ear, “Please come to my place.” And each time I had wanted to, but fear took over. What did it mean that I wanted it? I suspected I was bisexual, but had been told repeatedly that bisexuality wasn’t real. Well-meaning friends and less well-meaning customers told me I was simply bi-curious. I’d heard this so often that I was confused. Was what I felt for Mya only curiosity? It seemed like more. And that scared me. So I’d refuse. And she’d say, “I don’t understand. Don’t you want to be with me?”

I really do, I’d think, but shake my head and leave.

Now, Mya opened her passenger-side door and shut me inside as Rob yelled over the bouncer’s shoulder, “I wasn’t trying to make you upset. I just like you for real.”

I cried harder. The idea that he thought he liked the real me was too much to bear. He didn’t know the real me. No one there did.

“Ignore him,” Mya said as we sped off in her car.

At her place, Mya guided me to her bathroom. She kneeled down, turned on the bathtub faucet, and let the stream of water run over her fingers. “I’m going to give you a bath,” she said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

She stood up and ran her fingertips along the side of my face, then tugged at my clothes, removing each item slowly, and told me to get in. As I settled into the warm water, she poured rose bath gel onto a loofah and massaged it until it was foamy.

“I get the feeling that wasn’t really about the customer. What’s going on?” she asked as she rubbed the loofah over my back in soft, circular motions.

I took a steamy floral breath. I wanted to lie. It seemed like too much to tell Mya the truth, but the truth was too close to the surface.

“Eight years ago, two of my sister’s friends went missing,” I said. This was something I never intended to tell her, or anyone that didn’t already know.

I pretended it hadn’t happened. I pretended it hadn’t had any effect on me. I needed to be the stronger, older sister because so many people — including our mother — made the disappearance of the girls about themselves. Melissa needed me to let her have space to grieve without another person co-opting it. But what happened had also been so painful for me that I couldn’t face it.

“I can’t even imagine,” Mya said, shaking her head. She dropped the loofah, then cupped water into her hands, releasing it over my shoulders. The water cascaded down my back.

“Right after the second girl went missing, my sister—” I stopped, unsure if I should go on.  

Mya looked into my eyes. “You can tell me.”

“Why are you being so nice to me?” I asked, perplexed. It seemed like I might infect her with my pain. I never wanted anyone to see me like this. The suffering was off-limits and only allowed in private.

“Oh, Natassja,” she said, as if that was enough of an explanation. She touched my face and pulled me in for a kiss. “Let’s go to bed and cuddle. I won’t try anything, I promise.”

She took my hand, and I stood. Opening a towel, she patted me dry. She rubbed thick shea butter that smelled like peaches all over my body. The cream warmed quickly, melting as she applied it to my bare skin.

“Do you feel better?” she asked.

I nodded, though it wasn’t quite true. But I wasn’t crying — and that was close enough.

She led me to her bed and untangled my hair with a brush, one of my favorite sensations. It was one of the only tender things my mother had done for me as a child. I begged her to brush my hair until I was a teenager. Mya had no idea, but she was soothing me exactly in the way I needed.

***

“I started making amends,” my sister had said earlier that day as I pulled out of the Portland Community College campus parking lot where we were both taking classes. “And I need to tell you something.” Melissa took a deep and loud breath. I glanced in her direction, the crook in her nose visible from the many times she’d broken it when we were growing up, and then I looked back to the road.

My sister was 21, four years younger than me, and a year and a half clean. Snippets from the first time she received a jail sentence flashed before me. The court officer hauling her away. That I’d tried to tell her that I love her, but a different officer blocked me. She’s my sister, I’d said dumbly, pushing forward against him. I could feel the stiff bullet proof vest under his uniform. He grabbed my upper arm and threatened to arrest me, too. I went limp, and he dragged me to the exit of the courtroom, then flung me out into the hall. Stunned, I rubbed my arm. Red fingerprints would change to a ringed bruise that I continued to rub until it disappeared. It took two years: my sister in and out of jail. But once faced with time in prison, she finally stayed clean.

“Go for it.” I smiled.

I thought my sister might apologize for the time she stole my last $20. I’d called my mother that day and told her what Melissa had done. My mother didn’t believe me. It’s all the money I had in the world, I said, then sat in my car and wept. It was during one of several failed attempts to stop stripping.

Or I thought Melissa might apologize for one of the many times she’d accused me of being her reason for relapsing. In response I’d yelled, my voice strained, cracking: I’m the only person that’s ever truly loved you. Then calmly told her she could no longer be in my life as she sobbed. Later, I clasped my hands on my neck. I wanted to feel all the discomfort of my sore throat; the self-imposed punishment of my cruelty. The awareness that I was trying to guilt her into sobriety came over me, but we still didn’t speak for months. And the truth was that I did worry it was my fault. If it was my fault, it also meant I could control her — her addiction — but that I was failing. I owed her an apology, too.

‘Eight years ago, two of my sister’s friends went missing,’ I said. This was something I never intended to tell her, or anyone that didn’t already know.

“OK, this is it,” my sister said. “I was thirteen the first time I shot up heroin.” She stared ahead. I was confused. This wasn’t an amends. It seemed more like a confession. Prior to this, she’d insisted that she never shot anything into her veins. I hadn’t believed her, but I never suspected she might have been only thirteen.

“What do you mean? How?”

“It was right after Jessica went missing,” she said evenly, “when everyone realized that Allie hadn’t just run away.” I looked at her and she was looking at me. Her grey eyes stared straight into mine. She pursed her lips, and only moments later, unable to hold my gaze, she looked out the passenger-side window.

The mystery surrounding the disappearance of her friends, and how she suffered as a result, was her reasoning: the catalyst for her use of heroin. Except it wasn’t really. In that moment, I thought maybe if that hadn’t happened, she would’ve tried heroin later, at a more appropriate age. When she was 18, or 21. It was illogical. Is there an appropriate age to shoot up heroin?

I knew she’d tried meth by accident — it had been laced in some weed she’d smoked, when she was 11. She started smoking cigarettes and pot at 10. She’d been drunk at a Girl Scout meeting when she was 9. She posted pictures of herself high on Ecstasy on Myspace when she was 15. Her eyes glazed, dime-size pupils almost swallowing her irises, her jaw clenched. A purple pacifier hung around her neck. I don’t know when she started snorting cocaine, I just know it was her “favorite.” The drug she used compulsively, that she could never turn away. When exactly does an addiction start?

“But who gave it to you?” I asked. My chest burned and became itchy as hives blossomed there. I looked straight ahead so she couldn’t see the pain I knew would be obvious in my eyes. In the last year and a half, she’d transformed. The longer she stayed clean, the softer her face. The more she smiled. She rediscovered that she was nurturing, often playing with our younger cousins: rolling around in the grass, chasing and tickling them. She laughed. Thinking back to the little girl she was, the one that got so lost, was unbearable.

“It was Samantha’s stepdad. Remember her? I practically lived over there at one point.”

I remembered. Neither Melissa nor I knew our respective fathers. She latched onto men as result, but I tried to stay away from them. I learned early the damage men can do — at the hands of a family member — and it was something I wanted to inoculate my sister from. But, though the same man didn’t hurt her, I’d been powerless to stop others. Samantha’s stepdad had been one of the men I believed might hurt my sister. But there were many. There was the friend’s father that took Melissa on camping trips — only Melissa, no one else. Another friend’s stepdad that gave Melissa beer and requested back rubs from her. The paramedic who bought Melissa stuffed animals.

I’d begged my mother to stop letting my sister hang out with grown men. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d say. “She just wants a father and these men are willing to be something like that for her.”

She’s in danger, I’d plead.

“What do you mean it was Samantha’s stepdad?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.

“He was the one that laced the weed that one time. He said heroin would take my pain away and asked me if I wanted to try it.” She sighed.

I nodded, continuing to look ahead at the road, fuming, but trying not to appear rattled. I was afraid she’d stop entrusting me with this information if I reacted too strongly.

“So he found a vein and did it for me.”

“Did it help?” I asked.

Her growth seemed to have been stunted at the age of 10, and I’d been worried about her lack of development. My mind went back to her skinny arms and legs. She’d weighed less than 60 pounds. I’d been relieved when finally, at the age of 17, she grew and gained weight. She was now 5’7”, three inches taller than me, and a normal weight.

“I mean, the pain went away, but I started vomiting. It was awful.”

“Why’d you do it again if you hated it?”

“Because I’m a drug addict,” she said.

I was living in my first apartment by then. Melissa had been navigating the world without me. It stung — the idea that I had left her right when she needed me.

“It was my choice.” Her dark brown ponytail bobbed as she turned her head away from me before going on. “I have to take responsibility for it.”

In her addiction, she never stuck with anything. But now, she showed up each morning for classes at the community college. She maintained employment. She had become responsible, and yet, it seemed like she’d taken this ethos too far.

“But you were a kid.”

“Still, no one forced me. And it’s OK. I’m OK now.”

My knuckles whitened as I gripped the steering wheel, trying to focus on the bridge we were about to cross. We drove past Lucky Devil Lounge to the right, the club I’d be working at later that night. Melissa didn’t know I was stripping again. Months earlier, I’d quit and sworn I was done for good. She wasn’t the only one who lied.

I’d started stripping for the same reason I was doing it again: I needed money. But I’d long ago recognized the high I got while dancing. Nothing else made me feel the way dancing did. No substance could compare to the rush of getting naked for men — men who couldn’t touch me. Men who paid me to tease them, but couldn’t gain anything real from me. I could be as sexual as I wanted and no one could have me. That made me feel like the most powerful woman in the world. And that was the hardest part of quitting. I didn’t want to let it go. Even though, as time went on, the highs came less often. The façade that I had all the power had started to crumble. But, I longed for it anyway.

Was her addiction that much different?

Neither one of us spoke again for the rest of the 30-minute drive to the halfway house where she was living. In six weeks, I’d be moving to New York to study creative writing at the New School. I’d felt OK about moving because Melissa was clean, in school, doing well. Suddenly, I was unsure. How could I leave her? How could I have ever left her? It was irrational and I knew it, but I wanted to reach back into the past and change everything.

***

Two weeks after I graduated from high school, around midnight in the dining room of the duplex where my mother, sister, and I lived, I was hand-sewing a dress for a porcelain doll that would become Melissa’s birthday present when she turned 14. After finding the doll at a craft store for $3, I decided to make my sister something she’d always wanted. I designed my own pattern, using an old newspaper to trace it before cutting it into pieces. I based it on a Victorian ball gown and used shiny, satin fabrics in Melissa’s favorite color: purple, in several shades. And also designed a hat, purse, and parasol to match.

While Melissa was staying at a friend’s house, I was silently, carefully working on the dress when my mother started screaming from the top of the steps.

“You’re being too loud!”

Her sudden yelling startled me. I pulled the stitch I was working on too tight.

My mother stomped down to the dining room. She wore a baby-blue terry cloth robe, and her hair was a frizzy, wild auburn mess.

“You’re being too loud,” she yelled again, pointing at me. In a movie, it would’ve seemed exaggerated and funny. I held the needle strung with lavender thread perfectly still, as if moving would ruin the entire gown. As if I’d move and provoke more rage from my mother.

“I’m so sick of your shit,” she continued.

“I’m just sewing,” I said meekly, as if it weren’t obvious. “I haven’t been making any noise.”

I knew I was making a mistake. If she believed I was making noise, it was fact. She’d done things like this throughout my childhood. She’d burst into my room in the middle of the night, screaming into the darkness at me to “shut up.” I’d wake, confused. This was embarrassing when I had friends over. They’d whisper after my mother went back to bed, “Why’d she do that?” I’d smile weakly, unsure of what to tell them.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” she shouted.

The required reaction to these outbursts was simple: say I was sorry; say I’d be quiet.

I set the dress down while slyly examining the stitch I’d pulled too tight — I hadn’t ripped the delicate fabric. I looked over to her, but I didn’t say what I knew she wanted to hear.

“OK. I’ll go.”

The next day I found my first apartment. It was behind the mall where I worked, and the complex itself was rumored to be the most crime-addled place in the Portland metropolitan area: mostly drug deals, but also an occasional murder or rape. I didn’t care. Or more accurately: I couldn’t afford to care. I shared a one-bedroom with a friend. Rent was $450 a month; $225 each.

I thought about taking Melissa with me. Our mother wouldn’t object. On random slips of paper, I calculated my budget over and over, trying to figure out if there was a way I could afford to take care of both of us. It was 2002, and the minimum wage in Oregon was $6.50. Even if I managed to get 40 hours between my two part-time jobs, it wouldn’t be enough to adequately support myself, let alone another person. Melissa couldn’t come.

She’d weighed less than 60 pounds. I’d been relieved when finally, at the age of 17, she grew and gained weight. She was now 5’7”, three inches taller than me, and a normal weight.

As I grappled over what to do, I asked my closest friends, “What about Melissa?” They told me that I shouldn’t feel guilty; my sister wasn’t my responsibility.

Soon after I moved out, our mother refused to buy my sister school clothes or supplies, something she’d done several times to me. Extended family members or other adults in my life always picked up the tab, and I was both grateful and humiliated. These same adults called me when they found out I’d moved out. They all asked: What about Melissa? How can you leave her alone with your mother? They externalized my internal dialogue, and it deepened my guilt.

So, I did the one thing I could: I picked up the tab for my sister — I took her school shopping.

“Can I move in with you?” Melissa asked while we wandered through Target.

She wasn’t privy to my obsessing about taking her with me; the many pieces of paper that I’d calculated my budget on — then recalculated and recalculated and recalculated. I thought she was just smoking cigarettes and weed, drinking alcohol. I’d been concerned about those things, but she’d already tried heroin and I’d had no idea. Her request sucked the air out of the store. We stood in the fluorescent-lit aisle of office supplies. I focused on a package of gel pens and shook my head. She never brought it up again.

***

“People kept asking me, what about Melissa?” I said to Mya, her arms wrapped around me, her legs tangled in mine. It was a week after she’d bathed me. After that night, I went home with her every time we worked together. “And they were right. How could I have left her? How can I leave her again?” I stroked Mya’s hair.

“It makes perfect sense why you’d feel that way, but it’s misplaced. You realize that, right?” She traced the side of my body with the back of her hand.

“I thought that was true for so long. Now I’m questioning everything I’ve ever done. I feel like I failed her,” I said. I pushed Mya’s hair behind her ear.

“It wasn’t your job to protect her. It was your mother’s,” Mya said.

“I feel like I should take her with me when I move to New York.”

“You can’t fix what already happened. You know that, right?”

I didn’t know that. I believed, inexplicably, that I could still correct the wrongs of the past. But I didn’t say this. I shrugged, then tilted my face up and Mya kissed me deeply. We pawed at each other. Her skin was warm putty in my hands. I bit her neck lightly, then stopped.

“Oh my gosh. I completely forgot to ask,” I said. “Did you register for classes?” The last time I’d been over, we researched what it would take for Mya to become a vet assistant. Only an associate’s degree. We’d both done a happy dance in her living room that night.

Mya smirked. “I did,” she said. “I start in January.”

“You’re starting veterinary school right when I’ll be starting classes in New York. New beginnings for us both.”

“We should celebrate that,” she said, grinning. She climbed on top of me, and for a while I forgot about everything but her.

When she fell asleep, I listened to the even, slow pattern of her breath. I never wanted this to end, but the fact that it had to almost made it easier to just let myself feel. To be in the moment. To not worry about what could go wrong. Four more weeks and I’d be living in New York. Four more weeks to spend entwined with Mya. I opened my eyes. Orange light shone through her curtains. It was already past dawn.

Mya shifted in her sleep, reached out, pulled me in. And even though she was smaller than me, she made herself the big spoon.

***

I’d been living in New York for a year and a half, studying creative writing, when Melissa moved to live with me. By then she was three years clean. After I’d learned about the extent of my sister’s drug use, I hadn’t let go of the idea that she needed to be close to me.

Her first week in the city, we were walking down 2nd Avenue in the East Village when she remarked, “It’s a junkie’s paradise here.”

I froze. I’d worked at a sports bar on 2nd Ave. for most of the time I’d lived in New York. I scanned our surroundings. Everything familiar was still there: the pharmacy, the coffee shop, the bodega on the corner, the bars that lined the street, the indie movie theater, the Eye and Ear Infirmary, bags of trash. Those were the things I’d always noticed. Yet it was like Melissa did a magic trick.

Suddenly, instantaneously, I saw the block the way she did.

A girl in clean, ripped clothing nodded off on the corner: a street kid. She leaned against a building, then slid down to the ground, as if in slow motion. Slumped over, she stayed there — her head hanging, eyes closed, jaw slack. I spotted at least three other street kids nodding off, dotted along the sidewalk, just like she was. My skin prickled with the realization that I’d brought my sister into this world.

Six months later, Melissa and I stood in the bathroom of our apartment. “I need to tell you something,” she said, while pulling her right eye taut and then drawing black liner across her lid. She was getting ready for work. I’d been waiting for this conversation.

“So, I relapsed,” she said, then started lining her other eye.

“I know,” I said. A mix of rage and sadness filled me. Though she’d been able to maintain employment, paid rent on time — was acting as a responsible adult in these ways — her behavior had become more and more erratic. As were her moods. She stopped smiling. She didn’t laugh. Her face hardened. She stayed out many nights. Sometimes it was clear she was hungover, her eyes rimmed red, her face slightly swollen. And she’d lost at least 20 pounds.

“I knew you did. That’s the only reason I’m telling you. But don’t freak out. I have it under control. There is such thing as moderation. And you know that I never even got to drink legally, right?” She looked at me expectantly.

After I’d learned about the extent of my sister’s drug use, I hadn’t let go of the idea that she needed to be close to me.

“I need to think,” I said, then shut myself inside my bedroom. I did not have faith that she could keep it “under control” long-term. Our agreement had been that we would live together as long as she was sober. I’d considered this a formality. Of course she’d be sober. And we’d have a dry home. This changed nothing for me. I didn’t often drink, and never at home.

My hard-drug experimentation was also over. It had been brief, and my primary motivation had been to understand my sister. The one time I tried cocaine ended in uncontrollable sobbing. The one time I smoked heroin resulted in dizziness and nausea. In both cases, all I wanted was for the intoxication to end. And, afterward, a deep sadness settled over me that lasted for days. The only drug I tried and liked was MDMA. It made me feel like I could love, and more importantly, trust freely. I’d had a similar sensation with Mya, except no drugs were necessary. I didn’t feel compelled to actively seek MDMA out again. After experimenting, I felt no closer to understanding my sister or her addiction. My relationship with stripping was still the closest, but stripping was no longer appealing.

When I’d moved to New York I didn’t want to risk not finding steady work, so I’d started dancing at what was considered one of the most upscale clubs (and the first strip club to be traded on the stock market): Rick’s Cabaret. But, of the nine strip clubs I’d worked, this one was the seediest. The first time a customer grabbed my ass, I asked a bouncer for help. He said, “You’re a stripper.”

In New York, touching was against the law, but no one heeded this. I started slapping customers regularly. I’d never experienced anything like it. Even when I’d worked at a club that allowed touching, the girls decided who touched them and how.

One night at Rick’s, a customer whipped his limp dick out in a private room. When I told him to put it back, he asked, “What am I paying for then? Can’t you at least give me a hand job?” He, like the majority of the predominately white and rich clientele, felt entitled to extras. I left the VIP and refused to return until a bouncer helped. A manager eventually lied to the customer, telling him there were cameras in the rooms so that he’d cooperate. This customer claimed he was a famous music producer. The next day I verified this using Google.

Even on nights that I left with $2,000, the high I used to feel was missing. So much about stripping I had loved, but once it was done fulfilling my needs, it had been easy to stop. After six weeks, I quit.

Melissa’s plight wasn’t as simple. She’d experienced so much so young — I never blamed her for wanting to ease her sorrow.

After Melissa admitted she relapsed, I sat on my bed, hands shaking. I needed to tell her to move out. How was I going to do this? We avoided each other for a few days. Then I mustered the courage to approach her. She lounged on our red couch, playing Candy Crush.

I stood, lingering over her awkwardly and said, “If you aren’t clean.” I took a breath. “Then you need to move out.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like I said, it’s under control.”

“I don’t care. That’s the deal.”

It worried me to kick her out, but if I let her stay I’d be enabling her, which was the only thing that would be worse. I gave her 30 days to find another place.

“You’re being dumb,” she said.

I started shaking again. “You have to leave,” I repeated, before going back into my bedroom and burying my face into a pillow so she couldn’t hear me cry.

She must’ve known I was upset, but I tried to hide it from her. I stopped eating because nausea settled in, becoming my new norm. My skin turned sallow and splintered capillaries dotted the puffy skin under my eyes like bright red freckles. I cried often, but never in front of my sister. I thought I was done worrying that she might die or go to prison because of her addiction. Three years, I believed, was enough to know that it was over. Now I understood that “one day at a time” really meant one. day. at. a. time.

***

I fell asleep soon after realizing it was past dawn, entangled with Mya. What could’ve only been hours later, we both rose. We went to brunch. We ate off each other’s plates. Sometimes we got manicures. It was like having a best friend that I also had sex with. This, I realized, was what I had always wanted. I opened up to her in ways that I never had to a man. And in this I felt comforted. I was falling in love, but unlike with a man, I didn’t try to stop it. I let it be. Even with the knowledge the end was sure, it didn’t scare me. I felt like I could love her, but I wasn’t worried about what it meant. I assumed we’d stay friends. I assumed that what was between us would forever be sacred, no matter what else happened. To be with her felt safe. And in a way that I’d never experienced before.

My attachment to my sister wasn’t healthy, I suddenly knew.

And so, after my sister confessed she’d relapsed, absorbed in grief, I’d lie in bed and remember my time with Mya — how she’d soothed me when I’d needed it most. She’d bathe me, and I’d take steamy, floral breaths. She’d nuzzle up to me and I’d feel her warm minty breath on my neck. I’d stroke her hair, tuck it behind her ear. We’d gaze into each others eyes, and neither one of us looked away.

“She’s not your daughter,” she’d said. “And at this point, she’s grown. You need to let go.”

I didn’t listen to her at the time, but I knew that Mya had been right. And that two years after she’d said those words, I needed to listen. I needed to love my sister in a different way. To believe that things could be OK if I wasn’t trying to control where she lived, or what she did. Though our intimacy was so much different, I needed to take the lessons I learned about loving Mya and apply them to loving my sister.

Melissa agreed to move out instead of getting clean, and I tried to accept her choice. I meditated on let go.

Slowly, the color returned to my face; I realized I was starving and shoveled food into my mouth. The responsibility I’d been harboring for my sister started to fade. I stopped asking, What about Melissa? I began to understand that I could love my sister, but not take responsibility for her.

Three weeks after my sister told me she’d relapsed, she told me she was clean.

“And I’m committed to staying that way,” she said while shuffling her feet and wringing her hands. “Can I please keep living here with you?” She picked at the lavender nail polish on her thumb, then raised her head and looked at me.

It seemed like I couldn’t rightfully kick her out if she was sober, but I had no way of knowing if she was telling the truth. As much as I tried to let go of the responsibility I’d felt for her, it wasn’t as simple when she was standing before me. My head started to ache. I rubbed my temples.

“Natassja,” she said. “I swear.”

I clenched my jaw, looked up at the ceiling, and sighed.

“Please give me another chance.” She picked at the last bit of nail polish on her thumb. Sunlight illuminated the fleck of lavender as it floated to the hardwood floor, and I watched it as it fell.

* * *

Natassja Schiel is writing a memoir about her time working as an exotic dancer on the island of Guam titled Tumon Strip. Her work has most recently appeared at The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Opossum Literary Magazine.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

An Inquiry Into Abuse

Corbis Historical / Getty

Elon Green | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,019 words)

Roger Morris was standing on the South Lawn of the White House. It was early 1969, and Richard Nixon had only been in office for three or four weeks. Morris was a holdover on the National Security Council from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, staying on at the behest of Henry Kissinger. Morris and his colleagues had been invited to fill empty spots on the lawn during a ceremony involving a visiting head of state. “I was suddenly aware of this figure, very close to me on my right,” Morris said. “I looked over and it was Pat Nixon.” Morris decided that, though he’d never met the first lady, as a courtesy he ought to say hello.

When the event concluded, Morris turned to Nixon. “I just want you to know how much I am enjoying my work. It’s a pleasure to work for a president who is so well-informed in foreign affairs,” he said. Morris wasn’t just blowing smoke. He found Nixon quite knowledgeable about his own portfolio — Africa, South Asia, and the United Nations. As Morris told me, “[Nixon] knew a lot of heads of state in Black Africa, personally and well, for years.” And it wasn’t uncommon, he said, for Nixon to point out mistakes made by Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during briefings.

Nixon looked at Morris rather quizzically. “Oh dear,” she said. “You haven’t seen through him yet.” Morris, stunned, could only nod.

Pat Nixon was formidable. That year, during a visit to Vietnam, she became the first first lady to enter an active combat zone since World War II. But her relationship with the president could be a challenge. “No question it was a tough marriage,” Bob Woodward would tell Nixon biographer Fawn Brodie in 1980. “Even the people we talked to, who were very defensive about him, just felt that he didn’t treat her very well.”

Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who revealed the president’s secret taping apparatus, told Woodward not long ago that the first lady was “borderline abused.” Nixon would ignore her when they were together. “I wanted to shake him. ‘Answer her, goddamn it; she’s your wife!’”

There have also been darker reports, many of which were rounded up in Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s 2000 Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power. For instance: Allegations that Nixon “kicked the hell” out of Pat in 1962. That, after telling America that the country would not have him to “kick around anymore,” the former vice president “beat the hell” out of her. That, in fact, she had been so injured “she could not go out the next day.” That, on an unspecified occasion, one aide or perhaps more “had to run in and pull [Nixon] off Pat,” who sustained bruises on her face.

That Nixon struck his wife while he was president.

‘Oh dear,’ Pat said. ‘You haven’t seen through him yet.’

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. (The Nixons’ daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, unequivocally denied the allegations made in The Arrogance of Power in 2000.) But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity. The scrutiny is not commensurate with the accusations.

For years, journalists and historians have mostly danced around the reports, gently poking and prodding. Nixon chroniclers tend either to acknowledge that the reports exist without assessing their reliability, or they ignore them altogether. A conspicuous absence of specifics in the public record — dates, locations, and documentation — may be to blame for this, and, especially when writing about allegations of abuse, one must write with care and caution.

What can be said with confidence is the truth of the matter has not been been satisfactorily resolved. With the benefit of distance and perspective, it’s worth giving the alleged incidents a second look and considering their sources more closely, because allegations of abuse are taken more seriously today than they were a half-century ago — or even more recently, when this history was being written.

***

In 1962, Nixon was running for governor of California against Edmund “Pat” Brown. He’d spent the previous eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. Nixon was suited to the position. “Eisenhower radically altered the role of his running mate by presenting him with critical assignments in both foreign and domestic affairs once he assumed his office,” wrote Irwin Gellman, one of the great Nixon chroniclers. “Because of the collaboration between these two leaders, Nixon deserves the title, ‘the first modern vice president.’”

The gubernatorial campaign was contentious. “Nixon had charged that Brown was soft on communism and crime, while the governor claimed that the former vice president was interested in the governorship only as a stepping stone to the White House,” the Los Angeles Times recalled years later.

Brown told Fawn Brodie, in her Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, that during the campaign he heard that Nixon “kicked the hell out of her, hit her.” The book was published in 1981, which makes this, I suspect, the earliest on-record accusation of its kind.

In a recording of the interview from July 1980, which is held with Brodie’s files at the University of Utah, Brodie and the loose-talking former governor wonder if the alleged abuse — they had both heard the rumors — was physical or purely emotional; they’re uncertain. This is what follows:

BRODIE: Were you aware of Pat as a campaigner, in the campaign, at all? Was she —

BROWN: I don’t think she campaigned. She may have gone to a few women’s parties. But we got word, at one stage of the campaign, that he kicked the hell out of her. He hit her or some damn thing. Did you ever hear that?

BRODIE: That story keeps surfacing.

BROWN: Some of the guys that were on the plane with the campaign came to me confidentially and said, “Nixon really slugged his wife. He treated her terribly. He hauled her out in the presence of people.”

BRODIE: He slugged his wife in front of people?

BROWN: Well, in front of one of the press that was supposed to be friendly to him. He got so angry.

BRODIE: He hit her.

BROWN: But I can’t prove that. I never used it.

Brodie disliked Nixon. As Newell Bringhurst recounted in Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, Brodie called her subject a “shabby, pathetic felon,” “a rattlesnake,” and a “plain damn liar.” When, in November 1977, Brodie’s husband, Bernard, was diagnosed with cancer, she paused her research, quoting her husband saying: “That son of a bitch can wait.” (Brodie herself would die of lung cancer in January 1981, never entirely finishing the manuscript.)

In a recent conversation, Bringhurst called Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character Brodie’s weakest book. “It’s not a balanced biography at all,” he said. “She went into that — into the research and the writing — with a biased perspective.” It’s true, and understandably so: After Nixon was elected president in 1968, after promising to end the war in Vietnam, Brodie’s son was nearly drafted. When Nixon, several years later, attempted to smear the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation colleague of Bernard Brodie’s, it was salt in the wounds.

Brodie had for many years taught college classes on how to write a biography. And yet, said Bringhurst, “she violated, in many ways, the very canons that she tried to teach her students: You have to have some empathy and perspective for the person you’re writing the biography on.

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity.

Brown wasn’t the only source for accusations leveled against Nixon during that period. There’s a quote from Frank Cullen in The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, who, to their great credit, explore the allegations in greater detail than any biographers before or since. Cullen, a Brown senior aide, said he had heard that Nixon “beat the hell [out of]” Pat in the wake of the gubernatorial loss.

By the 1962 campaign, Cullen was an old hand at politics. He’d volunteered on John F. Kennedy’s congressional campaigns in 1948, and stayed on for the Senate run in 1952. In 1960, during Kennedy’s campaign for president, Robert Kennedy introduced Cullen to Brown, who would appoint Cullen assistant legislative secretary. (In 1972, Cullen helped coordinate the visit to the United States by China’s table tennis team that was later famously called “ping-pong diplomacy.”)

***

Other people have made accusations about Nixon. In March 1998, in a talk he believed to be off-the-record, Seymour Hersh told an audience of Harvard’s Nieman fellows about “a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.” Hersh would reprise the charge three months later during appearances on CNBC and NBC.

More recently, Hersh wrote about it in his memoir, Reporter. A couple hundred pages in, he writes that a few weeks after the resignation:

I was called by someone connected to a nearby hospital … and told that Nixon’s wife, Pat, had been treated in the emergency room there a few days after she and Nixon had returned from Washington. She told her doctors that her husband had hit her. I can say that the person who talked to me had very precise information on the extent of her injuries and the anger of the emergency room physician who treated her.

After receiving the tip, Hersh called John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s White House counsel. Ehrlichman not only declined to wave Hersh away from the story, but said he knew of two other instances of abuse: one from 1962 — presumably the instance referenced by Cullen — but also one that occurred during Nixon’s presidency. (Hersh, in an interview with me for the Columbia Journalism Reviewsaid his hospital source was a doctor.)

The biographers Summers and Swan, who interviewed Hersh, also talked to John Sears, who worked for Nixon in 1968. With Sears, who was suspected of being Deep Throat, it’s essentially a high-level game of telephone: Sears heard from Waller Taylor, a senior partner at Nixon’s law firm, that in 1962 Pat Nixon was hit so hard “he blackened her eye” and “she threatened to leave him over it.”

Sears, now 78, told me he was surprised by Taylor’s story because he himself had neither seen nor, until that point, heard of such abuse. Still, he said, “I saw no reason [Taylor] would make up such a thing. He was a friend of theirs.” This seems to be true. Summers and Swan note that Taylor’s father had been an early supporter of Nixon’s, and Taylor himself introduced Nixon to trickster Donald Segretti. Segretti, however, disputes the latter point. “I’ve had a lot of things over the years made up about me that are just complete fantasy. This sounds like one of those stories,” Segretti said. “I do not know who this Waller Taylor was, [and] I never met President Nixon.” (For good measure, without prompting, Segretti also denied authorship of the “Canuck letter.”)

Sears recalled telling the story to Patrick Hillings, who succeeded Nixon in Congress: “He said it was quite possible; the whole business of the loss in California had made them both upset, and that Nixon had finally agreed to move to New York and get out of politics. But there was a lot of problems in and around that.” Hillings, said Sears, didn’t attest to the truth of the allegations, “but he thought it believable.” (I asked John Dean, who succeeded Ehrlichman as White House Counsel, if he knew about the abuse allegations. Dean’s name doesn’t come up in any of these stories, but historically he’s been quite critical of his old boss — he cooperated with the Senate Watergate investigators — so I assumed he would be candid. “I have zero knowledge of RN striking his wife,” he emailed.)

Seymour Hersh told an audience about ‘a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.’

The game of telephone continues with a quote from William Van Petten, a reporter who covered the ’62 campaign. Van Petten told a writer named Jon Ewing that he found Nixon to be “a terrible, belligerent drunk” who “beat Pat badly … so badly that she could not go out the next day.” Van Petten, Summers and Swan write, was informed this had happened before, and that Nixon aides, including Ehrlichman, “would on occasion have to go in and intervene.”

What to make of it all? For his part, John Farrell, author of last year’s Pulitzer finalist, Richard Nixon: The Life, dismisses much of this, asserting that the sources are not to be trusted. “Richard Nixon fired John Ehrlichman. Nixon fired John Sears, too,” he said. (Sears said he left under a “mutual understanding.”) However, he allows, “Pat Hillings would have known. Pat Hillings was incredibly close to the Nixons. But he’s not with us anymore.”

Summers, who conducted the interviews with Ehrlichman for The Arrogance of Power, doesn’t believe that Nixon having fired Ehrlichman tainted the source. “In the sense that one assesses the credibility and character of someone who’s talking to you, I found Ehrlichman a credible interviewee, and not a vindictive interviewee.”

***

On August 8, 1974, 61-year-old Nixon resigned the office of the presidency. He was in poor health, exhibiting persistent phlebitis and shortness of breath. In September, he would be admitted to Long Beach Memorial Hospital, where he was given a blood thinner. Scans revealed evidence of a blood clot that had moved from his left thigh to his right lung.

Then, in October, after what one of his doctors later described as “groin pain and the persistent enlargement of the left leg,” Nixon went back to the hospital. He would remain there for three weeks and lose 15 pounds.

Sometime during this period, again according to Hersh, Pat Nixon was taken to a local emergency room. Evidently, her husband had attacked her at their home in San Clemente, California.

I called Hersh to see if he could shed more light on this. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “I’m not interested. Bye bye.” Mentioning that he had a guest in his office, he hung up.

So I asked Anthony Summers for more information, anything really, about that hospital visit. Did he and Swan attempt to verify Hersh’s source? “I have a very vague memory that we looked for a doctor at the San Clemente hospital.” Did he find the doctor? “I don’t recall.” He suspects the answer is buried in his notes, which aren’t retrievable.

***

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others. According to Farrell’s biography, during Nixon’s 1960 campaign for president, on a swing through Iowa, the strained candidate

vented by violently kicking the car seat in front of him. Its enraged inhabitant, the loyal [Don] Hughes, left the broken seat, and the car, and stalked off down the road. At an otherwise successful telethon in Detroit on election eve, Nixon once again lost his temper, and struck aide Everett Hart. Furious, Hart quit the campaign. “I was really mad,” Hart recalled. “I had had a rib removed where I had had open heart surgery, and that is where he hit me.”

Hart, said Farrell, spoke to Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, over the phone about the incident, and said he could not forgive the man. Woods summarized the phone conversation in a memo currently in Nixon’s archives.

More than a decade later, in the summer of 1973, Nixon, mired in the Watergate scandal, visited New Orleans to give a speech to a veterans group. It was expected to be a friendly audience. As Nixon walked toward the convention hall, reported the Washington Post’s magazine, “he wanted nothing in his way, in front or in back, before he got at the crowd inside.” However, “breathing on him from behind was [Ronald] Ziegler and the clump of TV cameras, mics, and newsmen that inevitably followed.”

An angered Nixon, as Michael Rosenwald wrote last year, “stuck his finger in Ziegler’s chest, turned him around, and then shoved him in the back hard with both hands, saying ‘I don’t want any press with me and you take care of it.’” It was even caught on tape, which was fortuitous because a Nixon aide later denied the incident had occurred at all.

***

The earliest chronological firsthand accusation is also the most shocking. In 1946, Nixon ran against Jerry Voorhis, a five-termer in California’s old 12th congressional district. Despite his incumbency, or perhaps because of it, Voorhis ran a terrible campaign. To boot, there were reportedly phone calls to prospective voters from an anonymous caller inquiring, “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a communist?”

Nixon destroyed him. In his account of the defeat, Farrell includes a quote from Zita Remley, a Democratic campaign worker of whom a Long Beach paper enthused in 1960 that, were she to ever faint, “it’s certain that she could be immediately revived by fanning her with a political brochure.” Remley found Voorhis “very white and sort of quiet. … He just sort of put his head in his hands.”

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others.

Farrell mentions Remley once more in the book, in the endnotes, where he accurately describes her as a “Democratic partisan” who claimed to have “firsthand knowledge of the anonymous phone calls.” However, he writes:

Remley, at least, is a troublesome source: a Nixon hater who fed at least one demonstrably false story about Nixon’s taxes to the press and claimed (more than 20 years later) that Nixon slapped her outside a public function — an assault that, if verified, would have ended his career but that she didn’t report to the police at the time.

Remley talked about the slap in question with Fawn Brodie, who wrote about the knotty tax business:

[Remley] had become a deputy assessor of Los Angeles County with the job of checking veterans’ exemptions. In 1952, just after the election, Nixon sent a notarized letter to her Los Angeles office requesting a veteran’s tax exemption, which was granted only to veterans who, if single, had less than $5,000 worth of property in California or elsewhere, and if married, $10,000.

As Brodie (who misspelled Remley’s first name as Vita) tells it, Remley knew that Nixon bought a pricey home in Washington, D.C., and denied the request. The powerful political columnist Drew Pearson found out and published a damning story.

Nixon was upset about it. In RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, he wrote that Pearson’s column was “teeming with innuendo and loose facts” and claimed that Pearson retracted the column three weeks after the 1952 election.

That sets the scene for what followed later that year. Brodie writes:

When Nixon was speaking in the Long Beach auditorium, Mrs. Remley went to hear him. Arriving late, she listened from near the open door. As he emerged he recognized her. In a sudden fit of rage, he walked over and slapped her. His friends, horrified, hustled him away in the dark. There were no cameras or newsmen to catch the happening, and Mrs. Remley, fearful of losing her job, told only a few friends.

Farrell doesn’t buy it. “She really detests Nixon,” he said. “She could have ended his political career right there by filing a complaint. And yet she never did. There’s no hospital report. There’s no police report from that incident. It’s just her talking, years later, to Fawn Brodie.”

Those doubts are among the reasons Farrell chose to exclude the Remley incident from the book’s text, “to signal to the reader that I didn’t believe it.”

Of the allegations more generally, Farrell continued: “In the period after Watergate, Nixon was accused of everything — some of it quite fanciful — and it’s significant, I think, that you had three of the greatest investigative reporters, Woodward and Bernstein and Hersh, and not one of them put it in print in their long investigations on Nixon.” Neither Woodward nor Bernstein responded to repeated interview requests.


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***

Farrell is right that, given the opportunity to thwack Nixon about this, the otherwise fearless trio declined. Maybe that means something. After all, if “Woodstein” and Hersh couldn’t nail him, who could? But maybe it just says something about the nature of investigative journalism; chasing dozens of consequential stories at any given time, and they don’t all pan out. Which doesn’t, of course, make them false. It just means the threshold for publication — a hospital report or a doctor’s testimony, perhaps — wasn’t met by deadline.

Decades later, we’re left having to deal with a handful of hazy stories, and wondering about the motives of the men and women telling them.

Of all the allegations, it’s Zita Remley’s that really gnaws at me. I am willing to concede, as Farrell contends, that Remley lied about Nixon’s taxes, even if there’s evidence she just made a dumb mistake. What I keep returning to is this: What did this obscure campaign worker stand to gain from accusing the still-living Nixon of slapping her? It certainly wasn’t fame. From what I can tell, Remley’s death in 1985 didn’t even merit an obituary in the local papers.

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls. Their lives do not seem measurably improved by sticking their necks out. (Quite the contrary. Stormy Daniels, for instance, was recently arrested for touching undercover detectives in a strip club — charges that were later dismissed.)

Now, imagine doing this 40 years ago — which is to say, 20 years before Monica Lewinsky was dragged through the mud and Bill Clinton left office with an approval rating of 66 percent.

What’s the upside?

***

“This is an agonizing subject for me, because I heard some of the same stories, from a much earlier period,” said Roger Morris. A source suggested I talk to Morris, who resigned from the National Security Council in 1970 when Nixon ordered the bloody Cambodian “incursion.”

Morris wrote 1991’s Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, which charts Nixon’s life and career through the election of 1952. He heard stories in Whittier, California, where Nixon moved at the age of 9, and Washington. The tales, always off-the-record, were passed along by friends and acquaintances, often elderly Quakers. (I asked if there was anyone I could talk to; Morris said they were all dead.)

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls.

“I had heard stories about the physical abuse of Pat Nixon as early as the Congressional years, which would have been ’47, ’48, ’49, and much of 1950,” Morris continued. “They had these terrible, raging fights, at high decibel.” Per the descriptions he heard of altercations at the Spring Valley home, Nixon had “manhandled” his wife, “not necessarily beaten. It was a violent relationship, in that respect.”

Morris didn’t hear the stories when he was in government, but only much later, starting in around 1983, when he began work on the book. He could never nail down the details, so, while his book includes accounts of the marriage becoming increasingly strained, there’s no reference to physical abuse. “I didn’t have any real, solid verification. I did not have any eyewitnesses.” Which is not to say his sources were bad, or distant; among them, Morris said, were in-laws of the Nixons. “They were plausible people, serious people.” He believed the stories, but lacked what he felt would be necessary for inclusion — eyewitnesses, testimony from doctors, or hospital records. (That’s to be expected, and it’s one of the inherent difficulties in writing about abuse.)

“If you ask me if this is probable — could it have happened? Absolutely. It is consistent with too much testimony of what we know about their relationship. It was stormy. It was given to outbursts of anger, profanity. It was not based on abiding, mutual respect,” Morris said. There had once been a great deal of love between them, “but as in many marriages, it was depleted and exhausted.”

Just before we hung up, Morris added: “We’re living in a very different era now, and I do think historical figures ought to be judged whole, as it were, against the setting of their times, but also against the setting of posterity.”

Elon Green is a writer in Port Washington, New York.

***

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Read more…

The Last of the Live Reviewers: An Interview with Nate Chinen

Fabrice Coffrini / Keystone / AP, Pantheon Books

Matthew Kassel | Longreads | August 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)

Jazz has changed a lot over the past 100 years or so of its existence, but it has never been as stylistically varied — or more packed with practitioners — as it is at the present moment. That’s a good thing for listeners, who now have many points of entry if they are new to the music and don’t necessarily want to start with a record that was cut 50 years ago. Mary Halvorson’s slashing guitar, for example, may appeal to more punk-minded listeners. The pianist Robert Glasper’s Dilla-esque grooves are a good gateway for hip-hop fans. And the tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s sweeping, spiritual-minded albums are a potential attraction for jam band aficionados. There’s a lot going on.

And yet, at the same time, there are probably fewer people writing about modern developments in jazz than ever. While niche magazines like JazzTimes and DownBeat are still going strong, there is scant jazz coverage in mainstream music publications (which tend to treat jazz like a novelty item), and the New York Times no longer runs weekly live jazz reviews (a recent development). Nate Chinen was, in fact, the last person to review jazz shows on a regular basis there, a position he left in 2017 after a dozen years contributing to the paper. He is now the director of editorial content at WBGO, the Newark public radio station.

In his new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, Chinen draws on his experiences as a former newspaper critic, attempting to make sense of what’s been going on in jazz over the past few decades. It isn’t an easy task, and he does a good job collating a whole lot of material, pulling on interesting threads and adding context for readers who may not be all that familiar with the reasons why Wynton Marsalis wasand still is, to an extent — a polarizing figure. Mostly, Chinen approaches jazz on its own terms. He describes what the music sounds like now and conveys to readers where modern jazz artists are coming from. In doing so he’s created a book that is truly of its time. Read more…

At Home on Carmine Street

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Abigail Rasminsky | Longreads | August 2018| 14 minutes (3,400 words)

 

When the two stragglers let the door clatter shut behind them, I turn the lights in the restaurant’s dining room all the way up and zip over to the stereo. For the past few months, we’ve been blasting the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” while closing. We all sing You may ask yourself, my God, what have I done? while manning brooms and mops and rags, none of us aware that we are singing of our own lives. At the chorus, we give in, drop what we’re doing and dance: Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…

I stack the chairs and tables as I’ve been taught, sweep crusts of bread and remnants of lettuce off the tiled floor, grab the register drawer with the remaining cash — 200, 300 bucks tops, since I’ve been emptying it steadily all night — while, behind the counter, Emily cleans the cappuccino machine and stashes the whipped cream, milk, and pie in the fridge. Tom drags the mop over the floor I just swept, the bucket for dunking sitting at the lip of the kitchen.

During the day, the place is bustling with people — upstairs, downstairs, out front, gates open all summer long. But now it’s 12 a.m. at The Grey Dog on Carmine Street in the West Village, and everyone else has gone home.

I leave Emily and Tom singing in the dining room, and carry the money from the register, platter-like in one hand, through the swinging doors of the upstairs kitchen, down the narrow, slippery staircase, past the dishwashing station and the baker’s area, where the croissants and scones are warmed at 5:30 a.m., past the catering department, where two Irishmen make platters of Caesar salad and triangular-cut sandwiches all morning to the sounds of NY1, and get to the restaurant’s windowless, corner office. I unhook the mass of keys from the loop of my jeans and let myself in. Sammy, the resident cat, slips past my ankles. The office reeks of cigarettes and pot.

Up on the desk, I count the cash, separating crisp bills from soft ones, count it again, and add it to the change drawer under the desk, which is always stacked with rows of 1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, and a couple of 50s — $1,000 or $2,000 total. Much of that night’s profits — but not all — have already been rolled up, wrapped in elastic bands, and dropped into a heavy metal drop box in the corner of the room.

When I’m done, I switch off the lights and lock the door behind me, making sure that Sammy is inside. If I forget — as I have before — the cat wandering the restaurant will set off the alarm at 3 a.m. and my boss will get a call from the police: There’s been a break-in.

Just as I turn around to walk through the unlit basement and bound back up the stairs, I see Emily in the semi-darkness. There is a gun by her right ear, its barrel pointing at me. Her body is bigger than usual these days — she’s 27 and six months pregnant with her second child, a mistake courtesy of a quick fuck in the restaurant’s downstairs bathroom with one of the cooks. They broke the sink off the wall, and now here she is, shuffling along the slick floor, belly first, with a man at her back, pushing her slowly into me, toward the office door at my back. I can barely see his face; it is nuzzled behind Emily’s hair and concealed by the panic on her own face.

Emily and I stand frozen in the underground quiet, looking at each other.

Then it hits me: The door.

I didn’t lock the front door.

Emily whispers, “Open the office.”
Read more…

Every Mission is a Suicide Mission

Midway / Namco

Nicholas Mainieri | Longreads | August 2018 | 25 minutes (6,273 words)

A tall man — mustard-yellow face paint, blackened eyes, Slurpee-blue mohawk, ripped denim, fingerless leather gloves, baseball bat on his shoulder — stalks past. He’s what they call a juvieganger, one of the cyberpunks who haunt the nearest interdimensional video arcade. He sneers: “Everyone’s looking around like it’s not 2038 or whatever.” Twelve-foot-tall columnar lamps emanate soft neon blues, pinks, and purples throughout the room. The dark walls bear bright geometric decals that look like 1980s fever visions of space-station Rubik’s cubes. On a row of LCD screens, space fighters zig and zag through cascades of extraterrestrial insects. Music pulses in the air, hypnotic beats threaded with the repurposed tones of old Commodore 64 games. An overwhelmed fighter explodes with a pixelated starburst. We groan, but enemies keep coming. The juvieganger guffaws, then prods a spectator: “You got any quarters, man?”

It’s 2018, and I’m in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the World Championship of Galaga, the 37-year-old arcade game whose anchor sunk deep into the cultural eddies of arcades, bowling lanes, pizza parlors, dive bars, and — at one time — fried-chicken joints, supermarkets, drugstores, and laundromats. In Galaga, a player’s control of the avatar is restricted to lateral movements along the screen’s bottom border. The gameplay itself bears the player irrevocably forward across a universe of multicolored stars. The triangular space fighter, red accents on its white wings, faces squadrons of Galagas. The Galagas are mostly space bugs: bees, butterflies or moths, dragonflies, scorpions, and cicadas (perhaps), but also, on several mildly perplexing stages, things that look like the Starship Enterprise. Dodge their missiles and kamikaze dives, mash the fire button. Once nothing remains but the austere depths of flickering space, advance.

The championship is the main event of the inaugural ScoreWars, an event organized by the arts collective Meow Wolf. It is held in a redesigned wing of their New Mexico headquarters, alongside the collective’s immersive, otherworldly exhibit, “The House of Eternal Return.” Beyond the row of ten Galaga machines hooked up to monitors, the arcade room features dozens of other classics tuned to free play for spectators, as well as a roped-off section of games including Track & Field, Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede, Robotron, and Nibbler, where well-known players will attempt to break their own high scores. ScoreWars, mindful of aesthetics and propelled by a reverence for the past, strikes a different tone than the contemporary competitions of big-business eSports. There’s something here that, even with the underlying finances, cuts more directly to the heart of what it means to play a game with one’s friends.

Music pulses in the air, hypnotic beats threaded with the repurposed tones of old Commodore 64 games. An overwhelmed fighter explodes with a pixelated starburst. We groan, but enemies keep coming.

Mark Schult, a friendly Hoosier and IT technician, is one of 10 pro-level qualifiers for the championship, where the winner will receive $10,000. Mark wears close-cropped brown hair. There are laugh lines at the corners of his mouth and blue eyes. His cheerful disposition brings the word “Midwestern” to mind. He loves the film WarGames. “A great technology movie,” he says, with bonus points for the scene in which Matthew Broderick plays Galaga. Mark and I work together back in Indiana, at the University of Notre Dame, where he supports the technology in my department. I didn’t know Mark that well yet when, one February morning this year, I overheard him recall eating a corn dog at the mall and listening to the electronic sounds from the arcade’s shadowed entrance like 8-bit sirens in a cave. It slung me back to the fifth grade, the corner of Skate U.S.A., and the frenetic theme of the Street Fighter II cabinet.  Read more…

How Women Survive the World: An Interview with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Naomi Elias | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,372 words)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, drug lord Pablo Escobar ruled over all of Colombia as if it were his kingdom. Escobar’s lethal combination of cleverness and ruthlessness allowed him to evade capture for years. A real-life boogeyman, his presence altered the atmosphere, layering everyday Colombian life with toxic tension: an opposition leader looking to curb the expansion of Escobar’s drug empire was assassinated, communities were terrorized by car bombings, and paramilitary recruiters transformed young boys into cold-blooded soldiers. Fear and uncertainty were normal states of mind for people who grew up in this era, people like Colombian-born writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras, who channeled her memories of this formative chapter of her life into a captivating debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.

In Fruit of the Drunken Tree, we are introduced to the Santiago family; Chula, age 7, her sister Cassandra, age 9, and their parents, who all live together in a gated community in Bogotá, Colombia. The Santiago family’s moderate wealth generally insulates them from contact with the criminal elements terrorizing the city’s lower-income neighborhoods, but this all changes when the family hires Petrona, a teenager from a poor guerilla-occupied slum, as their new maid.

At only thirteen Petrona is her family’s primary breadwinner, a burden that weighs heavily on her. Chula, enamored with the new occupant of her home, finds herself attempting to unravel the mystery that is Petrona, a girl of few words and many secrets. This curiosity eventually lands Chula in trouble — Petrona’s desperate attempts to juggle her duty to her family and her pursuit of the milestones of youth, like first love with a young guerrilla soldier, push her to engage in riskier and riskier behavior, and Chula’s deepening involvement entangles her in a violent conspiracy. Read more…

A Thereness Beneath the Thereness: A Jonathan Gold Reading List

Jonathan Gold poses for a portrait during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images)

For the past four decades, Jonathan Gold tirelessly catalogued the ebb and flow of cuisine in Los Angeles, and in the process, became known as the “food writing poet” of the city. That poet, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this past month, died last week at the age of 57. In his New York Times obituary Ruth Reichl, who published Gold in Gourmet magazine, said of the writer-critic,

Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and ‘Parts Unknown’ and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely. He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food.

According to David Chang, no one knew more about Korean cuisine than Gold, and the critic, whose career began as a music journalist, became the foremost expert on the various regions of the world. Some opine his speciality was Mexican and Central American cooking, having eaten at every pupuseria, taco stand, and restaurant along the 15.5 mile stretch of Pico Boulevard. But really, Gold’s expertise wasn’t limited by borders. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Justin Heckert, Hannah Louise Poston, Anne Helen Petersen, Jiayang Fan, and Rachel Greenwald Smith.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Behind The Writing: On Interviewing

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | July 2018 | 18 minutes (4,817 words)

I am slightly embarrassed to admit that for a long time I thought of writing in its strictest, most cinematic sense: as the act of sitting before the proverbial blank screen and conjuring meaning word by word, occasionally pounding a fist on the desk for emphasis or stretching to pet the cat. In grad school, I took the maxim that She Who Wrote the Most Became the Best Writer very literally, churning out pages upon pages that yellowed and blew around my apartment. I remember sitting down with one of my advisors for a thesis meeting and expressing some frustration about how research or the logic puzzle of structuring was eating into my writing time. He looked at me a little like how everyone in the Amelia Bedelia books always looked at Amelia. “But that is writing,” he said. I was flummoxed. “It is?” That seemed like cheating. Writing in my mind was only a mystical, pure struggle of sentence-conjuring; everything else was superfluous, a stretch before the race.

As my career has advanced and I’ve published an actual book and written for various magazines and cobbled together a living as a freelancer, my notion of writing has finally expanded to encompass my professor’s definition. In nonfiction, I’ve come to see writing as the whole process of bringing a piece to life and all of its component parts: the interview preparation, the interviews themselves, the transcriptions, the reinterviews, the careful chiseling and combining and rearranging of all this material. Writing is the broad research and the winnowing of broad research into narrower channels and tangents; the notes scribbled in reporting; the random quotes encountered in poetry or everyday life; the highlighting and mapping and organizing; then, finally, the actual word-by-word construction of sentences into story, which is more akin to building a nest from a thousand disparate twigs than conjuring a vision straight from one’s genius literary brain. It is all, in summary, much more humbling than it seemed at the outset.

Last year, I embarked on a project of new depth and scope: a book which entails a great deal of research and interviewing, and whose backbone is reconstructed narrative. As I delved full-time into the work, I realized I was as interested in the particular skills and techniques required to get and shape the material as I was in the material itself. I had focused for so long on the importance of the meaning of the sentence that I hadn’t thought about the art behind the rest of nonfiction writing. Part of the goal of this column, then, is to shine a light on some of those aspects of writing — interviewing, research, structuring, and more — that could be defined as “craft” and are often hidden behind the actual prose.

To tackle this column, I took the standard approach I’ve developed over my early career as a writer: look to the women. Women writers still face entrenched stereotypes and biases, underrepresentation in reviews, and a significant byline gap in publishing. I have found that one silver lining to this discrimination can be women writers’ commitment to helping one another out, supporting one another’s work, and navigating what often feels like an inscrutable insiders’ network together. With that spirit in mind, for this first column on the subject of interviewing, I looked to three women writers whose work I deeply admire: Lauren Markham, Sarah Smarsh, and Jennifer Percy. I read and reread their remarkable books, then spoke with each of them about the skill, art, and technique of the interview.


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One reason I chose these three women’s work was because each of their books leans heavily on reconstructed narrative: scenes from characters’ pasts that the writer didn’t witness and that need to be put together in vivid detail from interviews. Much of my work as a journalist has relied on reconstructed narrative, and I am fascinated by the puzzle of interviewing the same subject over and over again in order to flesh out the shape and texture of their life. It is not a linear process. It does not proceed like: Tell me about the day you did X. How did that feel? What did it look like? What happened next? Now tell me about the day you did Y. For me, it often involves getting a big gush of information in the first interview, then going through it to highlight areas of particular interest or ambiguity, then going back and asking more about those areas, then repeating this process ad infinitum until the information becomes a story.

Lauren Markham spent two years reporting The Far Away Brothers, a beautiful, devastating nonfiction epic that follows twin brothers Ernesto and Raul Flores (not their real names: Markham used pseudonyms to protect their identities) from El Salvador as they embark on a perilous journey across Central America and Mexico to the United States, fight their way through immigration limbo, and struggle to build a new life for themselves so far from home. Markham described her interviewing process as “entering through the side door.” She gave an example from the powerful opening scene in her book: her main characters, the young Salvadoran twin brothers, are in a car en route to a court appointment in downtown San Francisco. They are late, and they are stressed: If they miss this court date they could ultimately be deported. They are driving around in circles with their older brother. First Markham got the information about the times, the streets, the weather, the basics of how they were feeling. But the details that give the scene the poignancy necessary to open a book about American immigration came through the side door: Long after her initial interviews for the car scene, she and the twins were chatting about something else when one mentioned casually that he’d always thought of the United States as a land of skyscrapers, these big beautiful buildings, but once he was here, he realized it wasn’t really like that. Markham asked him how he felt under the skyscrapers in San Francisco that morning, and out of that conversation arose this passage:

At seventeen, the twins have never been to a city before — unless you count San Salvador, which they’d been to only a few times to visit relatives, or Mexico City, where they were practically shackled to their coyote, hunkered down in the spectral underbelly of the pass-throughs. San Francisco looms like no other place they’ve ever seen. Raul used to picture these buildings in the quiet night back home, rising upward like ladders, like possibilities. But now that he’s under them, they’re just endless, indistinguishable boxes. They make him feel, as most things in the United States of America so far do, small and out of place.

These moments, Markham suggests, are not ones you can necessarily ask about directly. “If you say to any of us,” she told me, “‘What are some of the most foundational memories from your childhood?’ we’re like, ‘wahhhhh?’” But if you’re willing to make the investment of time, you eventually find a way in through the side door.

Another day, Markham went on a bike ride with the twins and they told her a story about how when they were little in El Salvador they’d stolen corn and used it to buy a bike; it was such a perfect memory to encapsulate their childhood. To elicit this type of early experience in particular, Markham relied much more on the coefficient of time spent with her subjects than on the expertly crafted interview question. She told me, “I think building real, honest, genuine relationships from your heart with whomever you’re interviewing makes for better journalism and more humane journalism. And of course there have to be boundaries and there has to be the clarity of OK we’re not friends and I’m still a journalist, but you can still be operating from a place of deep compassion and connection with someone.”

Writing about immigrants who attended the high school where Markham works in Oakland, California, posed an ethical dilemma that terrified her initially. She did not want the twins to feel obligated to participate in her project; she did not want to seem like she was taking advantage of her position; she didn’t want to blend her role coordinating services and programs at the school with her role as a journalist. She agonized over this with her boss at work until finally she told her, “Listen, we let journalists in here all the time to connect with immigrant communities, and we are constantly making a calculation of do we feel this person is trustworthy and do we feel that we trust them enough to connect them with students or families. Of all the people I’d want to write this story, it’d be you.” Markham was still uncertain about putting an undue burden on the twins until finally, she told me, she realized, “I was so freaked out about these young people’s ‘inability’ to make a decision and understand the kind of nuances of my dual role, that in fact I was infantilizing them. They walked from El Salvador to the United States, and I was sort of projecting on them this inability for them to understand or to make a decision on their own.” She sat down with them, explained her project, and told them they didn’t have to make a decision right away. By this point, they were no longer students and were 18 years old. She was surprised when they immediately agreed. They wanted to tell their stories. They wanted to be heard.

Throughout the entire writing process Markham was hyper-aware of the clichés inherent in writing about immigrants: painting them as the perfect, sad heroes, as one-dimensional victims. She wanted to include all the complications of their lives, their shitty decisions, their adolescence. They were teenagers, after all, living by themselves in a foreign country. “Showing them in their roundness was a way to crack open the trope of immigration,” she told me.

Her commitment to showing her characters’ full, complex humanity comes through in so many details of daily life and personality: the way the twins’ faces form “matching masks of dread” when they are late for an appointment; the bright red the Mexican snack food Takis stains their lips; the comfort they feel as they cuddle in a pilled blanket with their brother’s girlfriend’s chihuahua; the movies they watch (Finding Nemo) contrasted with their Facebook posts (tough-guy proclamations and shirtless pics); the way each holds a baby (Ernesto, “cautiously, like a bowl filled with water,” and Raul comfortably, “his face soften[ing] into an old expression something like innocence or wonder”). The most potent information, Markham said, came from just talking to and observing them, but it should also be said that her interview process was extensive and methodical. She had a regular interview schedule with the twins and over the course of years developed a “crazy mosaic” of information: details related to the car and the court date, to the journey northward from El Salvador, to the desert, to their time in an immigrant detention center. She knew that the power of the narrative would ride on detail, and whatever she didn’t glean from observation over time, she tried to ask about: What color was the sofa? What about so-and-so’s shirt? Maybe they didn’t remember the sofa or the shirt, but they did recall the wallpaper, and she’d write that down.

The technique Markham relied on most was asking the same question over and over: Tell me again about this.

The technique Markham relied on most was asking the same question over and over: Tell me again about this. “We already told you!” the twins would say, but they would tell it again, and when a detail changed she’d ask about it. She learned this in a workshop with Rebecca Skloot, who said that if you only have the testimony of one person and can’t corroborate, interview that person over and over and see where there are discrepancies. These discrepancies, Markham told me, are often “portals into more complex questions and realities of the story.”

Jennifer Percy also relied on this technique during the three years she spent reporting and writing Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, the harrowing story of a soldier who, after a traumatic event in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of his best friend, returns home to the United States with PTSD and attempts to cure himself and other suffering vets using exorcism in small town Georgia. Percy found herself asking for the same story over and over, trying to break down the heroic version she initially heard. She needed to get through that stiffness of the rehearsed narrative to something rougher and more authentic. She was not after the same kind of authenticity as Markham; where Markham wanted to convey in precise detail the nature of her subjects’ journey northward, Percy wanted to illustrate the emotional and psychological power of war stories, the way they are constructed, the way they can be unreliable, the complex questions that unreliability poses.

Percy was heavily influenced by James Agee’s Let Us All Praise Famous Men and by the notion that nonfiction will always operate with limitations and will never be able to represent the world as it is. These limitations are some of the central tensions of her book; she portrays herself as the writer, the interviewer, struggling to understand across a gulf that is also the gulf between the average American and the soldier returning from war with PTSD. In the parts of the book in which she herself is present as a character, actually depicted interviewing on the page, the reader interviews through her in a way, struggling to make sense of experiences that in the end are impossible to untangle by everyday reasoning. “I asked him all those questions you’re not supposed to ask, about how many you killed, and death and destruction, and I asked him about morals,” she writes. The sense of the terrifying foreignness of both the questions and the answers is palpable. Percy is not acting here as the hidden expert deciphering this world for us, but instead as a novice we can identify with and relate to the characters through. “It didn’t really feel like I was trying to be an expert on the subject,” she told me, “but rather going into it as a question, with questions. That was what was driving the book.” Here the awkwardness of the interview is the story itself: How does someone who has never been to war understand war, and how does someone who has been to war make it comprehensible?

Percy is not acting here as the hidden expert deciphering this world for us, but instead as a novice we can identify with and relate to the characters through.

Percy obtained many concrete details — the height the aircraft at the heart of the narrative was flying when it crashed, its position, its specs — from sources other than her main subject, Caleb. With him, she focused predominantly on how he was struggling to make sense of an extremely traumatic experience.

This meant learning when to stay silent and when to push back. At first, she told me, her tendency was to react to these stories of trauma in the way she would react to a friend who was grieving: to respond empathetically, to ask sensitive questions, to tread very carefully, until she realized that this wasn’t actually what her subjects needed. They wanted her to listen, so she grew quiet and listened.

She eventually became less nervous about asking difficult questions, and as her relationship with Caleb evolved over years and he increasingly insisted on bringing her in line with his vision of the world, she pushed back a little harder against it. This delicate line in interviewing between privileging a subject’s view of the world, trying to comprehend it with as much nuance as possible, and challenging some of the improbable or biased or ethically dubious aspects of that view is one that Percy navigates masterfully. The narrative is tense with interactions like the following, in which Percy gestures to the gulf between her experience and her narrator’s, and to her own doubt, and at the same time gives credence to the necessity and fullness of his convictions. In this scene, she challenges Caleb and he challenges her back, and in the interplay between them lies the trauma.

“I tell him gently how sometimes when people convert to new religions they project their faith backward, using religion to explain difficult situations.”

“That’s all very interesting,” Caleb says,” but I have no doubt that this thing has been after me my whole life. I know you think this all sounds crazy, and don’t get me wrong, so do I.”

He crosses his arms and presses his lips together like a beak.

“What exactly would be the point of me going through deliverance?” I ask. He keeps telling me to consider it.

“Let’s say you did. What do you think it might have?”

I don’t say anything.

Then a few breaths later in that same scene, Percy asks:

“Did you feel anything after deliverance?”

“White noise,” he says. “All this white noise. I didn’t even know it was there and suddenly it was gone.”

In the first third of Demon Camp, which is written like fiction — a lyrical, haunting story of a vet growing up, going to war, and experiencing its horrors — Percy wanted to convey Caleb’s point of view. She taped many conversations and appropriated his language and rhythms directly from those transcripts. She also prepared him for interviews by saying, “I’m going to ask a lot of questions that seem really irrelevant. Can you spend a lot more time talking about this random object in the corner of the room?” She would tell him, “Slow time down to where you’re going to take me an hour to describe ten minutes.” What emerges from this is an almost embodied nonfiction, where Percy is in a way channeling her character. Of the night Caleb lost his virginity, Percy writes, “She showed him what to do in the way a mother might show her child how to fold a napkin.” Of his eagerness to believe in deliverance at a conference in Rhode Island where people came to be rid of PTSD, she writes, “He was born into a family who spoke of God at warm meals.” Percy gives me faith that, with enough time and observation, it is possible to use powerful, lyric prose to convey the experience of another person. She does, however, attribute the particularly lyric style of Demon Camp to the fact that it was her first experience of reporting, and she came into it “without any baggage in that realm.” I, too, feel that I now have too much baggage as a reporter to write as freely as I want, and I find Demon Camp exciting in how it breaks convention with much of standard literary journalism. It illustrates the possibility of being rigorous with interviewing and reporting while still writing a haunting, transporting work, harking back to the writing of earlier literary journalists like Didion and Wolfe.

Percy gives me faith that, with enough time and observation, it is possible to use powerful, lyric prose to convey the experience of another person.

In her highly anticipated debut, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, Sarah Smarsh also wanted to illustrate the imperfections and limitations of nonfiction, and the fact that the stories she is telling are not the ultimate, absolute truth but rather the subjective recollections of individual human beings. She wanted to emphasize the wit, insight, and personality of her characters — her family, blue collar workers who have so often been depicted mainly in demeaning stereotypes, or denied a voice at all in American culture. At first, Smarsh intended to immerse the reader in a narrative that read like fiction, a seamless recounting that made her interviewing invisible. But then, she told me, she realized that “for me, the family members who I was interviewing, who are dynamic characters in the book, are so original and funny and vibrant in their own words that I found however much I honed a narrative based on the things they told me, it was leaving one of the greatest strengths of the story on the table if I didn’t let them do some speaking for themselves.” This was also, she explained, “a subtle way of reminding the reader … (a) I’m not making this shit up, and (b) it’s not all about me. I’m building this from hopefully empathic conversations with people whose stories go back further from my own.” This tactic of forgoing the unbroken enchantment of a narrative that reads like fiction for a sense of real people telling stories allows Smarsh to pull off a remarkable feat: Although her book is a memoir, her voice and presence feel secondary to that of her family, and her consciousness, though it is actually writing and constructing the story, does not feel as though it is what drives the book.

Take, for example, Smarsh’s description of her grandmother Betty’s move from Wichita to Smarsh’s grandfather Arnie’s wheat farm:

Betty peeled untold pounds of potatoes, baked pies, fried meat, and stewed vegetables that grew outside the front door. She learned the isolation of rural life through a batch of cookies — she had everything she needed but the brown sugar. What was she supposed to do, drive ten miles west to Kingman just to get one damn ingredient?

“It wasn’t like when you lived in town, you’d bebop down to the QuikTrip,” she told me years later.

She learned to keep the basement overstocked with discount canned food, the deep-freeze packed with every cut of meat, the cupboards filled with double-coupon deals.

Heartland is driven by Smarsh’s memories and framed by her childhood, but in the end the book is not really so much about her — that is, her interior self and struggle — nor is it propelled by her voice in the MFA-ish sense of “voice.” I was amazed by this when I read the book, and it speaks in large part to the power of her interviewing. In an author’s note that prefaces the book, Smarsh notes that she researched and wrote the book over the course of 15 years, conducting “uncounted hours of interviews.” The resulting narrative demonstrates not only the extent of these interviews, but also Smarsh’s particular understanding of this world and these people and the empathy she has for them. While much of the uniqueness and insight of Percy’s book came from positioning herself as an outsider, trying to figure this world out — she told me that she doesn’t think the book would have had the same resonance had she come into it as a seasoned war reporter — Smarsh’s book derives its empathetic power from her belonging, her intuitive sense of this place. Much of the narrative, and of the conversations in the book, revolve around the tangibles of places, houses, jobs: the emotion is implied and pulses subtly and largely unstated beneath these facts. She was not asking her grandmother, “What did you feel? What did you think?”

Smarsh’s book derives its empathetic power from her belonging, her intuitive sense of this place.

When your own society hasn’t cared about you for decades, she told me, “those truths are experienced at some strata that is below words and articulation.” The lack of articulation of these truths in fact drove her to become a journalist in an attempt to articulate them. What makes her book so singular is the fact that she is able to convey this repressed or buried emotion in the language and the worldview of her characters. She doesn’t try to speak for them in what she calls “fancy English.” (She told me she speaks two forms of English: country and fancy.) She uses her understanding of this place and this worldview not to translate it but to convey it, with the skills and ethics of what she describes as “an old-fashioned hard-ass twentieth-century newspaper training.” We chatted briefly about Katherine Boo, whose work shares much in common with hers, and she remarked that Boo’s writing is exceptional because Boo doesn’t impose “her own inevitably socialized way of seeing reality” onto the people she’s writing about. The same could be said of Smarsh.

Like Percy, Smarsh emphasized the importance of being comfortable with silence. She described the interview as a forced, staged, artificial reproduction of what we do every day: talk to people and elicit interesting stories and information. “It’s sort of like if someone is just naturally hilarious and whenever you sit around and drink beers they crack everybody up, but if you put a microphone in front of that person and you’re like, ‘Be funny!’ they kind of shut down,” she said. This is the awkwardness the interview can generate for writers.

Smarsh told me she hates awkwardness and she has a “crushingly high empathy default setting,” but she’s learned to pause, to leave space for her subject to fill in. The most powerful and true answer might need that space, even if it makes the interviewer squirm.

I asked Smarsh about how interviewing family differed for her from interviewing strangers and if she employed any unique techniques. Her response was that actually approaching family interviews as a journalist — a professional working in a field with specific demands and protocols — made it easier for them to tell her their stories. This approach, she told me, “allowed my family to say, This is just work. I’m a journalist, I’m just doing my job, and if there’s anything my family respects, it’s someone just doing their damn work.” The interviews were not a touchy-feely let’s-all-understand-one-another session or, as Smarsh put it, her family saying in gushing tones, “Let’s support darling Sarah’s work!” Rather, she said, they were “basically the writing version of sharpening some tools in the shed.”

Smarsh told me she hates awkwardness and she has a “crushingly high empathy default setting,” but she’s learned to pause, to leave space for her subject to fill in. The most powerful and true answer might need that space, even if it makes the interviewer squirm.

I, too, have played this I’m-the-journalist role with my family: in particular, with my younger brother, when he went on a soul-searching road trip one summer and I begged to accompany him, as if he were the budding musician and I the rookie reporter for Rolling Stone. I have found it fascinating how much I could not know — and could come to understand — about someone I’ve known my whole life. The space that opens up between family members with that journalistic distance, with the curiosity and novelty of that role, can reveal objects hidden in plain sight. Smarsh describes writing about her family in this way, as a journalist, as “the most transformative process I’ve had as a human being”; in understanding the social, cultural, ground-level factors that made her mother in particular who she was, Smarsh was able to forgive her.

Smarsh described herself at one point as a “journalist of everyday life,” a phrase that seems at once intuitive and uncanny. I’ve come to latch onto it as a guiding principle; I love both its sweep and its specificity. In many ways, the art of interviewing, and of reconstructing the narratives of “regular” people — that is, not celebrities or public figures — is the art of making everyday life exceptional and fascinating, of seeing what we either take for granted, miss, or cast only a passing glance at in our narrow worlds. In the case of all three of these writers, everyday life contained significant traumas that would be foreign to many readers, but it also contained infinite small moments of tenderness, heartbreak, and connection, and the brilliance of their work is the ability to convey both: to map out the forces that shape a life and also all the quirks of individual strength and personality that define it.

The interview can feel like an act of transgression or, at worst, of violation, and at the same time like the ultimate veneration, a low bow before the infinitely layered experience of another human being. It is a unique intimacy, uncomfortable and pleasurable, awkward and at times transcendent, a spark of meaning that flashes between two often very different people. As Smarsh put it, “You are being given a gift.” And as with any gift, the giving and the receiving are complicated: How to reciprocate? How to honor? How to achieve balance? And is that even possible, or the point?

To look at the interview is to understand writing not as the solitary endeavor of the genius performing her sorcery but as relationship, as negotiation, in which a writer is trying to simultaneously remove herself entirely from a story — to in fact scribble out her assumptions and readings — and to purposefully tell that story with all her skill, will, and vision. The interview acts as a prism illuming the ultimate goal of any writing: to use one’s language and self and brain as a way of getting beyond self and language and brain into a larger realm, a shared one, a more universal one built of the most microscopic blocks: And what did the river feel like? Tell me about the wallpaper.

* * *

Sarah Menkedick is the author of Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm (Pantheon, 2017), which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her second book, about an epidemic of anxiety in American motherhood, is forthcoming from Pantheon. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Pacific Standard, Oxford American, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross
Fact checker: Matt Giles