Search Results for: Marriage

In the Grand Scheme of Things

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Hana Schank | From ‘The Edge of Normal’ | June 2015 | 11 minutes (2,634 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from The Edge of Normal, Hana Schank’s story about what it’s like to raise a child with albinism, a genetic condition whose most striking characteristic is white blonde hair and pale skin. Many people with albinism are also legally blind. Writes Schank, “The story is not just one of life with an unusual special need, but also the story of how I’ve changed, and continue to change, as I help my daughter navigate the world.”

* * *

Two weeks after the pediatrician had introduced the word “albinism” to my vocabulary, my husband and I sat in the stuffy waiting room at the neurologist’s, gently rocking my daughter’s car seat. This was the man who would tell us what was going on with my perfect-imperfect daughter. There was still a chance the pediatrician was wrong. After all, everyone else agreed it was probably nothing. Or a brain tumor or cancer. Those were also things that could cause nystagmus or visual impairment. But it was probably nothing. Or albinism. Or nothing. It was probably nothing. Read more…

Romantic Landscape: Going Mad in the Eternal City

Photo by Bert Kaufman ((CC BY-SA 2.0).

How terrifying. I’m glad you’re recovering, I write back. I’m at a dinner party in Rome and I think I’m having some kind of breakdown. I’m scared. I’m not sure who I am anymore and I don’t have a concussion to blame it on. Or Percodan. Can you email Percodan?

Sounds like we’re in the same place, he writes back. But listen: I know who you are. You are passionate and joyful. Try not to be scared. That is not your true nature.

It hits me like a slap that if my husband has ever said anything like that to me, I cannot remember it. That in fact his last words to me were along the lines of “You think you’re so put together and you don’t even see yourself. You’re a fucking trainwreck.” And that mine to him were “Thanks. Happy anniversary: enjoy your celibacy.”

I turn my face to the wall because I’m tired of crying in front of people.

Amy Glynn, in berfrois, takes us through an identity-shattering — and rebuilding — experience: the simultaneous decline of a marriage and withdrawal from psychotropic drugs in the dizzying, intense eternal city, Rome.

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Jennifer Nix on June Carter Cash’s Influence on Her Life

Photo via Jazz Guy/Flickr

In our hotel room that night, I broke out “Press On” and we took turns listening to songs on my Discman. Johnny and June’s duet “The Far Side Banks of Jordan” visibly stirred my dad, and at song’s end he said, “I wonder which one will go first. The other won’t last long after that.” A room service tray holding two plates relieved of pecan pie sat on the bed between us—I remember that detail because it was the last time I was alone with him. Three months after he walked me down the little white church’s aisle, and just three days short of a new millennium, my 57-year-old father collapsed by the Christmas tree in our cottage and died of congestive heart failure…

…I first set out to write a tidy piece about my love for June’s voice because it is equated with some of my greatest happiness, and with pretty much the whole world I shared in celebrating the popular myth about the love between Johnny and June. After digging into the reality of that love and life, I am boundlessly inspired by the real woman’s story and my heart is open wider. Anchored in Love showed me June not only had to deal with Johnny’s continual addictions, but she saw her son and two daughters, Carlene Carter (from her first marriage to Carl Smith) and Rosie Nix Adams, struggle with alcohol and drugs, which also led to various estrangements. That they found roads to rapprochement before her death gives me hope and some courage to try to find a way back to my mother. I am a writer, and after five years of impasse, this is how it had to start for me.

—From “Pressing On,” an essay by writer Jennifer Nix about the impact of June Carter Cash’s music on her life, and the parallels between Carter’s family struggles and her own–originally published at The Rumpus. It’s now included in Here She Comes Now: Women in Music Who Have Changed Our Lives, a new anthology edited by Jeff Gordinier and Marc Weingarten, which includes essays by Rosie Schaap, Elissa Schappell and many others.

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Death Made Material: The Hair Jewelry of The Brontës

Portrait of Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (via Wikimedia Commons)

Deborah Lutz | The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects | W.W. Norton | May 2015 | 42 minutes (6,865 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book The Brontë Cabinet, by Deborah Lutz, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers.

* * *

Long neglect has worn away

Half the sweet enchanting smile

Time has turned the bloom to grey

Mould and damp the face defile

But that lock of silky hair

Still beneath the picture twined

Tells what once those features were

Paints their image on the mind.

—Emily Brontë, Untitled Poem

If the Brontës’ things feel haunted in some way, like Emily’s desk and its contents, then the amethyst bracelet made from the entwined hair of Emily and Anne is positively ghost-ridden. Over time the colors have faded, the strands grown stiff and brittle. Charlotte may have asked Emily and Anne for the locks as a gesture of sisterly affection. Or, the tresses were cut from one or both of their corpses, an ordinary step in preparing the dead for burial in an era when mourning jewelry with hair became part of the grieving process. Charlotte must have either mailed the hair to a jeweler or “hairworker” (a title for makers of hair jewelry) or brought it to her in person. Then she probably wore it, carrying on her body a physical link to her sisters, continuing to touch them wherever they were. Read more…

Bill and Doug Got Married

Longreads Pick

What a difference 10 years makes: Justin Heckert’s 2005 Atlanta magazine feature about two men in Georgia whose marriage was not recognized by the state.

Published: Jun 30, 2015
Length: 8 minutes (2,100 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Interior of the United States Supreme Court. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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

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‘They Ask for Equal Dignity in the Eyes of the Law. The Constitution Grants Them that Right’

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed. …

The States have contributed to the fundamental character of the marriage right by placing that institution at the center of so many facets of the legal and social order.

There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle. Yet by virtue of their exclusion from that institution, same-sex couples are denied the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage. This harm results in more than just material burdens. Same-sex couples are consigned to an instability many opposite-sex couples would deem intolerable in their own lives. As the State itself makes marriage all the more precious by the significance it attaches to it, exclusion from that status has the effect of teaching that gays and lesbians are unequal in important respects. It demeans gays and lesbians for the State to lock them out of a central institution of the Nation’s society. Same-sex couples, too, may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage and seek fulfillment in its highest meaning. …

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.

It is so ordered.

—From Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in in Obergefell v. Hodges, a 5-4 ruling that now makes gay marriage legal across the United States.

Read the ruling (PDF)

Four Stories About Merle Haggard

Merle Haggard, 1975. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Legendary country singer Merle Haggard died today at 79. Here are four profiles of the master, by four master writers, that follow him through the years.

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The Art and Business of Book Covers

When I moved out of my previous home, I donated more than three-fourths of my book collection because I was moving into a tiny space. I had no logical process for deciding which books I kept. Some were sentimental, with handwritten notes written inside; others were souvenirs I bought during my travels. These books seemed obvious to keep. Yet I was also inclined to keep hardcovers I’d never read or even opened, simply because the covers were attractive. All of these books, together, would represent my best self — the one I wanted to display on my shelves.

As I read more online, and since my physical shelf space has dramatically shrunk, I wonder: what makes an eye-catching, effective book cover? Which books will make the final cut?

Here are pieces I’ve enjoyed, new and old, about the art and business of book cover design.

1. “Judge This: The Power of First Impressions.” (Chip Kidd, Medium, June 2015)

In this excerpt from his new book, Judge This, Chip Kidd explains that balancing clarity and mystery is important in design, and shows how both elements informed the covers he designed for books by Oliver Sacks, Harry Kramer, Haruki Murakami, and David Sedaris.
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‘Why Don’t Pure Loves Meet?’ On the Radio in Afghanistan

Photo: Lig Ynnek

In this beautiful piece from Matter, Mujib Mashal takes the reader to the Afghani airwaves, into the hearts of its listeners. From the complications of arranged marriage to online dating woes, the youth of Afghanistan have a lot on their minds. DJ Ajmal Noorzai solemnly shares their stories on his program, The Night of Lovers. 

When the show first aired, callers were reticent to speak honestly. But slowly, with Ajmal’s guidance, they opened up — so much so that stories had to be debated before they were aired. In one, a young girl named Sameera sobbed as she recounted falling for a man other than her arranged spouse. Honor is everything in Afghan society; it is a highly shameful act for a female member of the family to engage in relations of any kind with a man before marriage. Producers had to be careful to safeguard Sameera’s identity.

Sameera had been engaged to a man for three years; he was a good man. But no matter how hard she tried “to send her heart his way,” she couldn’t. Her family — her sister, her brother — tried to help her forget the man she truly loved, without success. She felt trapped. “I just wanted to share this with the listeners. I am a very pained girl. Good night to you — and I pray that those who have not been united with each other, they meet again. God protect you.”

What struck Ajmal about Sameera’s story wasn’t just that she was speaking honestly, openly, about a taboo subject. It was that she was connecting to thousands of others united in pain and heartache. Afghanistan is a nation of suppressed pain, in its every color and form. A nation awash in PTSD. We have seen such extremes that what elsewhere would draw the attention of psychologists here is considered normal. Pain is something to be dealt with in solitude, to be “only shared with the mirrors,” as the poet Qahar Asi put it.

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